Enter tasks - Microsoft Project Tutorial

- [Instructor] To get a schedule off the ground, you need to tell Project about all the work that needs to be done to complete the project. Before we create tasks though, there are just a couple of settings we need to change. We're going to start by heading down to the status bar at the bottom of the window. You'll see that it says, and this is out of the box, new tasks are manually scheduled. Well we're going to click that and change it to auto scheduled because that way the program is going to calculate the task dates for us, and that is really what we want. So I'm going to click that to change that setting. Now we're going to go up to the file tab, and then down at the bottom click options. In the project options dialog box, I want to head to the schedule category. You'll see this section, scheduling options for this project. Down below that, there is a checkbox, new tasks are effort driven. What this means is that the total work stays the same unless you specifically change it. We want to turn on that checkbox because most tasks are effort driven. For example, if you have a task and you say, it's going to take 40 hours of work to clean the house, well, it's going to take 40 hours whether you have one person or two people. So we have that turned on. I'm going to go ahead and click okay to close the dialog box. And now, we can create our tasks. I'm going to click the first blank task name cell. At this point, you can fill in the task names one after the other. Type the task name and press enter to go to the next line. So I type in the name of the first task, review lab design, and press enter. That jumps down to the task name cell in the second row so I can type the next name. I type in and press enter, and I can type the next one. Well let's say at some point, you make a mistake, and you forget a task somewhere in the list. You can always insert a new task in the list. To do that, you can right click the task in the list below where you want to insert the task. So I'm going to right click receive equipment, and on the shortcut menu, click insert task. That selects the cell, and it's filled in with new tasks. But since the cell is already selected, I can start typing immediately. So I type in purchase MRI and press enter. Now that we've created a few of the tasks, let's look at what Project adds to these tasks. First of all, the task mode shows a blue bar with a right arrow. That means that it's auto scheduled. In addition, when you create a task, if you don't specify the duration, project fills in one day question mark. Now this is an estimated duration. Whenever you see question marks in the duration, it means that you haven't added your plan durations yet. So it's just a reminder to get around to doing that. In addition, the start date for these tasks is set to the project's start date. That's how you create work tasks. The great thing with this approach is you can keep your hands on the keyboard. Type a name, press enter, and then rinse and repeat.