The Best 7 Microsoft Project Tips for Beginners

Are you just starting to use Microsoft project? If yes, we understand how tricky it can be particularly for beginners. Don’t worry, even experienced professionals can get stuck sometimes. Since we know it can be a tricky endeavor, learning new hacks can be pretty time-saving.

Even if you are using a third-party MPP viewer, with relatively few features to help you save time and resources, it can be an uphill task for new users. We can imagine, how worse it would be having to deal with the complexities of the MS projects.

So, we want you to have the best experience when using Microsoft project to do your tasks. That’s why we have compiled a list of essential tricks from experts to enable you to perform plenty of actions when using standard or professional project versions.

1. Be mindful of the essential keystrokes

Before you start scheduling your projects using an online MPP viewer or any professional versions you have to remember the helpful keystrokes:

• The INS key: This key will help you insert blank lines.
• F3: using this key will remove any filter within your project.
• The Del key: It’s used when deleting task lines.
• Summary task: By deleting the summary task, you will delete all the summary detail tasks.

2. Begin with simple projects

When learning to assign resources and creating charts to use in your Microsoft project, it’s always advisable to start with simple projects. For instance, you can choose projects such as planning to install a vegetable garden. With a project like this, you will quickly learn how to set schedules, assign resources, and plan cash flow and set your budget.

3. Make the Most of Free Educational Resources

It’s advisable for beginners to make great use of the freely available Educational resources on the internet. Can be quite expensive. That’s why it’s wise to utilize these resources to avoid paying for costly. Make sure you are reading the right version of educational resources. If most companies are using Microsoft Project 2016, you should make sure the demonstrations are of the version you are using.

4. Collaborate

Collaborative ability enables Microsoft Project to be one of the most critical tools to use for your projects. Newer Microsoft Project versions allow you to export your project files to SharePoint to share data with other people. You can also use GanttPRO MPP viewer to create charts for your projects. By so doing, input from other people will help you simplify your project setup.

5. Select an alternate calendar to use as the project calendar

When you select an alternate calendar to use as the project calendar, the views will display the standard calendar. To show the alternate calendar, you have to change the views. Expose a view, right-click on the right side of the view, and change the calendar being displayed.

6. Use Right-clicking as a way to get to a lot of options

Right-clicking is the most synonymous feature for most of the project tools including the GanttPRO MPP viewer online. To get to varieties of feature selection menus, right-click on the Ribbon, timescale, Gantt chart, column titles, on a task, on a resource, and many more. Some of the options can only be accessed by right-clicking.

7. Create a new window to combine projects for reporting and linking tasks between projects

If you want to temporarily join projects for purposes of reporting and linking tasks in between projects, creating a new window Microsoft Project is key.

Conclusion

You cannot use a project tool that you don’t know about. It’s important that you learn the basics and how to use such tools to schedule your tasks, assign resources, create an ideal budget, etc. While there are other alternatives such as GanttPRO MPP viewer, which promise ease of use because of their fewer features, it never gets easy to perform actions if you are a beginner.

In this article, we have created a list of top tricks from professionals to help beginners navigate through Microsoft Project with ease. Be rest assured to save your resources and time if you use our tips. Even professionals can make use of our hacks in case they get stuck managing their projects.