Microsoft Project Tips Weekly

- Hi, I'm Bonnie Biafore with another project tip. Today, I'll show you several shortcuts for opening your project files. So here I'm on the open page in project. If you work on a few projects, a really easy way to get to them is to pin them on the open page. You'll see over on the right side that there's a pin section up at the top of the list. And when you pin a project there, it will always appear above all of your recent projects. So let's go ahead and pin a couple of projects to that list. To do that, what you do is you point at a recent project file, and when you point at it, you see a push pin. If you click that push pin, it jumps up to the pin section and it stays up at that top of the list. Now I'm going to point at another one and click its pushpin. And it also jumps up to the pin section at the top of the list. Then to open it, you can just click it. Another quick way to get to projects is with some options. So let's go to the file tab and click options on the left side. In the project options dialog box, we're going to head to the advanced category and then scroll down to the display section. We have a few options for what we want to see. The first one is show this number of recent projects. So it's set to eight, and that means that the open page is going to show my eight most recent projects. You can also quickly access recent projects. It's set to five, and I'm going to keep that number the way it is. The third option is to show a number of unpinned recent projects. So let's change that from five to six. Then go ahead and click OK. So let's see what these options do. That gives me a chance to tell you about a great keyboard shortcut. A quick way to open up projects open page is with control O. Hold down control and press the O key, and that takes you straight to the open page. Now, the first thing we're going to look at is over on the left-hand side, you can see that there's a project listed there. And then because of the resolution of my screen, it says more. If I had a higher resolution, you'd actually see more projects, but if I click more, I have five projects that will always appear on that navigation bar on the left. And if you want to open one of those, you can just click it to open it. Now let's press control O again to get back to the open page. On the open page, we're going to look at the right side this time. Now first of all, the right side shows a list of recent projects. So that will show the eight most recent projects. In addition, I have my two pinned projects up at the top of the list, so they will stay there no matter how many projects I open. Finally, I'm looking at recent projects, but there's also folders. So if I click folders, now I can see the six most recent folders that I've gone to. Those are all great ways to get to the projects that you want. So for example, if I click this exercise files, it will open up the open dialog box to the folder that I selected and I can select the file that I want. Now I'm going to click cancel to close that. And by showing you another keyboard shortcut. If I press control F12, that bypasses the backstage completely and opens the open dialog box. And that way you can navigate to the folder you want and select whatever project. And there you have several ways to quickly open your project files.