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Microsoft Office Project Standard 2007
The goal of project management software is to provide you with the tools you need to effectively accomplish your tasks and manage your resources so you can complete any and all projects on time and within budget. MS Project gives you project management tools with the right blend of usability, power, and flexibility so you can stay informed and control project work, schedules, and finances and keep project teams aligned.
MS Project features four primary areas: Tasks, Resources, Track and Report. These different sections divide each project into categories that let you navigate easily through the program. MS Project makes project creation extremely easy. Start your projects pre-populated with a template to save time. Use one of the out-of-the-box templates provided or create your own custom template. Its spreadsheet-like interface lets you use your keyboard to add milestones, tasks, dates and resource assignments to your project quickly and efficiently.
MS Project also helps you keep track of employee hours, materials and supplies, and project costs, which is essential for keeping your project within budget. With the budget field, you can assign budgets to projects and programs. The new “Cost” resource type improves cost estimation and tracking. Other cost enhancements include more predefined fields that map to financial fields tracked in project accounting systems. Custom reports in MS Project are available, letting you keep track of different aspects of the project, such as statistics, employee work loads, and financial status.
MS Project makes adding and managing resources extremely easy. You can create slots for resources and assign them to tasks as simply as entering data in a spreadsheet. Resource details, skill sets and resource notes let you keep information about your employees within the software, so you can assign the right task to the right resource.
MS Project’s scheduling includes calendars for a day-by-day breakdown of tasks, timelines for an overall view of the project, and events for specific milestones within the calendar. Recurring tasks come in handy, making scheduling meetings or maintenance tasks simple and quick. You can expand and hide these tasks so you can find what you need as quickly as possible. The interactive Gantt chart works by allowing you to update your project as needed right on the graph and is much simpler than manually inserting new data into the task list.
The Visual Reports feature uses Microsoft Office Excel and Microsoft Office Visio Professional to produce PivotTable views, charts, graphs, and diagrams based on project data. MS Project integrates with MS Outlook, letting you contact resources through your address book. The team calendar offers a daily overview of tasks and milestones to be completed by groups or individual employees. You can compute and track core metrics unique to your project by defining custom fields based on your formulas and graphical indicators can alert you when specific conditions are met. You can share and manage documents related to your projects using Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services.
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