Microsoft Project 2010: The Missing Manual

Appendix B. Getting Help for Project

Microsoft Project may be your first introduction to project management concepts like the critical path (Finding the Best Tasks to Shorten) and the work breakdown structure (Saving Your Project). For you, Project presents a double challenge: learning what the program’s commands and checkboxes do, and learning what to do with them. Or maybe you’re a project management expert and just want the dirt on how to use the features to get your work done: scheduling, budgeting, and reports. For you, learning Project is a technical exercise: which tab to display first, how to get a feature to do what you want, and how to avoid the program’s gotchas and limitations.

Project 2010 Help has improved in one important way: Help topics are more likely to tell you why a feature is helpful, the best way to put it to use, and even give examples.

What hasn’t changed is that finding the information you need is your biggest challenge. The Project Guide, the one vestige of project management activities linked to Project features, is no longer available in Project 2010. On the other hand, Project 2010 scatters tidbits of assistance throughout the program. For example, if you point to a column heading, a ToolTip tells you what the field represents and may even show the formula Project uses to calculate it, as you can see in Figure B-1. Or if you point to an icon like the Insert Summary Task on the Task tab, you learn that the command inserts a summary task to help ...