Microsoft Project 2013: The Missing Manual

Preparing to Update Your Project

You may be raring to start adding status updates to your Project file, but you need to have a few things in place before you begin. Your file needs to be set up so Project can calculate the schedule and the variance between your plan and what actually occurs. You also need to tell Project how you want it to handle the updates you enter. In addition, you can make your updating job easier by setting up a customized view to go with your progress-tracking method. This section steps through each of these prerequisites.

Setting Tasks to Auto Scheduled Mode

If you’ve fine-tuned your schedule to make it realistic and to balance resource workloads (see Chapter 11), your project’s tasks are already set to Auto Scheduled mode (Automatically Scheduling Tasks). But if any tasks are set to Manually Scheduled mode and should be Auto Scheduled instead, switch them to Auto Scheduled mode before you start entering updates. (See Manually Scheduling Tasks for reasons why you might create manually scheduled tasks and keep them that way.) That way, Project can recalculate your schedule based on the status updates you enter. For example, if an update shows that a task is going to take longer to complete, the program takes care of rescheduling the task’s successors based on the revised finish date. Flip to Switching the Task Mode as you Work to learn how to change a task’s mode.

Setting a Baseline

Another important step to perform before recording status updates is to set a ...