Microsoft® Office Project 2007 All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies®

Chapter 3. Exploring Task Views

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✓	Getting an overview of views
✓	Choosing the best view for your needs
✓	Displaying combination views
✓	Exploring various task views
✓	Making use of resource views
✓	Discovering great views for tracking progress

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In real estate, they say a view is worth thousands. In Project, the right view could easily help save you thousands. That’s because views are the way you get at all the valuable data you need to keep your project on track and within budget.

Essentially views in Project provide you with different perspectives on your Project plan. Some help you focus on resources. Others help you get your tasks in line. There are views that make data entry quick and easy, and others that help you track progress on your project.

In Book I, Chapter 4 we discuss the three most commonly used views — Gantt Chart, Network Diagram, and Calendar. In this chapter, we go deeper into views, showing you some of the more esoteric but very useful views Project makes available to you.

A View for Every Need

Think about it: After you enter all the project, task, and resource data for a big project of, say, 1,000 tasks, you’ve created a powerful database of information. Add to that, Project automatically performs complex calculations on that data to make information about schedules, costs, dependencies, and more available, and you have a huge chunk of data at your disposal. The way you get at that data is through views.

Many people spend the ...