Microsoft Project Tips Weekly

- [Bonnie] Hi, Bonnie Biafore here with another Project tip. You can't do anything about tasks that are already done, and you don't need to do anything with tasks that aren't behind schedule. In this tip, we'll filter the tasks to show only the ones that are incomplete and a troubling amount behind schedule. So here I have a custom view that I've been working on, and it already has dashboard icons to show performance, and a group, so that the work tasks are grouped by finish variance. Now, if I scroll through here, I can see that I have three groups, tasks that have a variance from two to three weeks, then a group of one to two weeks, and finally from zero to one week. Well, let's go ahead and filter this list, and I want to look at this for tasks that are incomplete and more than five days variance. So I'm going to go to the View tab and in the Data section, go to the Filter box, I'm going to click the down arrow, and on the menu that appears, choose New Filter. That opens up the Filter Definition dialog box, and it selects this generic name of Filter in the Name box, so I can go ahead and type the name for my filter. I'm going to start with c underscore to show that it's a custom filter, and I'll name it Behind Schedule. Now I have to set up my tests. Well, the first field is going to be for incomplete tasks. The field that I use is percent complete, I start to type the name and when I see it in the box, I can go ahead and click the Test cell. Now, I want this test to be Is less than, and the value is 100, because if the percent complete is less than 100, then the task is incomplete. Now, for the second test, I start in the And/Or column, and I'm going to choose And, because the tasks have to pass both of these tests. So the field name is going to be Finish Variance. The task has to the incomplete and the Finish Variance is going to have to be greater than or equal to five days, so I select the field name Finish Variance in that box, and then I can go to the Test cell. Well, I'm going to click the down arrow and I want this to be Is greater than or equal to, and in the Value cell, I'm going to choose 5d for five days. That's the filter I want to apply, so I'm going to click Save to save the filter. Now, I can go up to the Filter box, click the down arrow and I see my custom filter up at the top of the menu. So I'm going to choose that to apply the filter. Now, when I do that, I'm going to scroll down and you'll see that there is only one group now, a finish variance of two to three weeks, which is 10 days to 15 days. Well, what happened to the other groups? It turns out that the tasks with shorter variances were all complete. So you can't use them to shorten the schedule. They're done. All the remaining tasks are behind schedule by more than five days. And that's all you have to do to filter your tasks by the ones in some trouble that you can still do something about.