Microsoft project tutorial
Learning faster, saving time

This Microsoft project tutorial is part of our learning time management skills series.  After reading this tutorial you should be able to set up a simple project.

Microsoft project is an excellent project management support tool.  It allows you to create and manipulate a Gantt chart and its associated artefacts.

I’ve created a simple plan which I’ll refer to during this tutorial.  You can download the plan using this Microsoft project tutorial link.

This is the view you should get when you open the plan:

This is a simple plan showing the activities needed for putting up a fence.  I’ve deliberately picked a simple project to allow us to focus on the tool rather than project planning techniques.

The view has a number of columns.  The first column we'll look at is the "Task Name" column.  In this column you can see that I’ve added a number of activities that’ll be required to enable me to get my fence built.

Adding Tasks

To enter tasks into Microsoft project you simply select a cell and then type in the task.  Microsoft project automatically adds in information for the Duration, Start and Finish columns.  If you try this you’ll see that it assumes a 1 day duration and a start date of today’s date.

When creating this project I typed in the entire task list, adding one after the other.  I then moved to the Duration column and typed in the duration of each task.  This is pretty straightforward and quite quickly I had a basic plan in place.

I wanted to have a heading for my plan of “Put up a fence” so I made this an overview task.  To do this you select all of the tasks that you want to be under the “Put up a fence” task.  To select them click on the first task, “Select Fence” and while keeping the mouse button held down drag it over the other tasks.  The tasks should now all be highlighted.

To make them sub tasks of the “Put up a fence” task you simply click on the green arrow indicated in the picture below.  The button is highlighted in orange and has “Indent (Alt+Shift+Right)” below it.

In the plan I’ve developed you can see that I’ve also added in links or dependencies between the tasks.  This is quite simple to do.  You highlight the two tasks you want to link and then click the link button.  I’ve shown this below:

The link button is highlighted in orange and has the text “Link Tasks (Ctrl+F2)” below it.  When you click on the button an arrow is drawn between the tasks.

As I’ve shown in the picture you aren’t restricted to tasks that are adjacent.  You can select any tasks simply by holding down the Ctrl key and clicking on the task with the mouse.

To move the starting position of a task you can simply change the date in the Start column.  This will move the start date of the task whilst retaining the same duration.  Microsoft project will then calculate a revised end date for the task.

Adding Resources

So far in this Microsoft project tutorial I’ve described how to set up a project and add tasks to it.  You can however do lots of other activities with Microsoft project, one of the more important being adding resources.  So the next part of this Microsoft project tutorial is adding resources to a task.

To add resources to a task I click on the  “Assign Resources” button which pops up the Assign Resources box.  For the purposes of this Microsoft Project tutorial I’ve added into the box two resources: John and Mark.

When the box initially appears it’ll be blank.  To add resources you simply click on a cell and type in the resource name.

This box shows that those resources are already assigned to the highlighted task “Clear area for fence”.  If you look back at the task prior to the resources being added you’ll see that it was 5 days long and now it is 2.5 days long – half the time.

Using this technique you can easily add resources to the various tasks.  Microsoft Project will automatically change the length of your tasks to fit with the resources you add.

You can adjust how much time a person works on a task.  For example you could change John to 50% and you’ll find that the total task length works out at 3.33 days.

Working out how this is calculated is too advanced for a foundation level Microsoft project tutorial.  However you can consider it simply in this way:

	Day 1	Day 2	Day 3
John	50% which is 0.5 day	50% which is 0.5 day	50% which is 0.5 day
Mark	100% which is 1 day	100% which is 1 day	100% which is 1 day
Total worked so far	1.5 days	3 days	4.5 days

So by the end of day 3, 4.5 days have been worked leaving only 0.5 days to be completed.  This results in an overrun into day 4 of 0.33 of a day.  That is some of Mark’s time and some of John’s time.

We’ve now completed the areas I’m going to cover in this Microsoft project tutorial.  You’re now able to:

• set up a project add dependencies

• adjust durations

• adjust start times

• add resources

• assign resources to tasks

• adjust the resource allocations

This covers the basics of creating a plan.  Once you've got the basics you'll find that there is a lot more Microsoft project is capable of achieving if driven properly.

If you’ve any thoughts you’d like to share on this Microsoft project tutorial please email me at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .