Step By Step Tutorial on Microsoft Project: Getting Started in Twenty Minutes

There are no pre-requisites to the course you are embarking upon. To begin learning how to start a project in Microsoft Project, this tutorial lesson, as well as the ones that follow, are written assuming the reader need not have any prior experience with any project management software. For that matter, you only need to know two things to start creating your first project using Microsoft Project application:

1) You need to know how to start the Microsoft Project software installed on your computer.

2) You must have a broad idea of your own project and its activities (also referred to as tasks).

It is as simple as that, and we will keep it that way throughout the series of tutorial lessons you will go through learning new features of Microsoft Project software as you go along.

The tutorial is written in such a way that it does not matter whether you have Microsoft Office Project 2007, or Microsoft Project 2003, or any earlier version up to Project 98 installed on your computer. The limitations of the older versions, if any, and the new features of the newer versions will be dealt with, as necessary and relevant to the tutorial.

For this tutorial, of course I will give you an idea of a sample project and its activities, with which we will learn the steps required to create a project. You can (and it is recommended that you do) try out all the steps you learn here on your own project after completing each lesson.

When you are finished with this lesson, be sure to check out some of the other Microsoft Project tutorials available at Bright Hub.

Ready to start. Here we go...

For the Sample Project, assume you are the Project Manager with an Event Management firm, and the first simple project entails organizing a musical concert at one of the local auditoriums. The major activities involved, as you can realize, will be fixing a suitable date with the artiste, identifying and finalizing terms with one of the local auditoriums, co-ordinating with the media and placing advertisements for the event, getting tickets printed and selling tickets. Besides this you may also want to address the administrative tasks of organizing hotel accommodation and transport for the artiste's troupe. How can you plan all these activities on a calendar, using Microsoft Project?

Here are the steps:

Open the Microsoft Project software on your computer (In most cases, you may have the application icon on your desktop, which you can double-click to start the application. Else, click on Start-> Programs-> and look for your software and click). You should see

the opening screen of Microsoft Project. (Note: Click any image in this tutorial to see a larger view.)

In case you can see a blue Guide pane to the left of the "Gantt Chart" divider, as shown in the figure to the left here, please close this blue pane by clicking on the X at the top right of the blue pane, so as to increase the visible workspace for entering data in our Sample project. Once the Guide pane is closed, your screen will appear as shown in the figure to the right here, with only two panes - the Task pane and the Calendar pane to its right, as shown here.

Enter Tasks and Duration

Now you can start entering the data in the Task pane for our Sample project. For the moment, ignore the first column in the Task pane, and enter the data only under Task Name and Duration columns. The tasks and the durations you need to enter are as follows (the default unit for duration is "days", hence you only need to enter the numeric part):

• Call up Artistes - 5 days
• Finalize Artiste and performance date - 2 days

As you enter the task duration, you can see a Blue bar appearing on the right, graphically indicating the duration. This is the task bar, and the collection of these bars is called the Gantt chart. We will worry about this later. For now, keep entering the further tasks:

• Call Auditoriums and check date availability - 6 days
• Negotiate with Auditorium - 3 days
• Confirm Auditorium and pay in advance - 2 days
• Book advertisement slots in media - 21 days
  

  click to enlarge
• Print tickets - 20 days
• Sell tickets - 10 days
• Organize accommodation for artiste's Group - 5 days
• Organize Travel arrangements - 5 days

After you have entered all of the above tasks and durations, your screen should look like the screen shot on the right. At this point, please save the project (File-> Save as) in a folder of your choice with file name as "Concert 0". (Concert Zero, to indicate this is the Zero-th version of your project). All Microsoft Project files are saved, by default, with an extension ".mpp", and we will use the default extension.