Microsoft Project Tips Weekly

- [Bonnie] Hi, I'm Bonnie Biafore. In this project tip, I'll show you how to recover a sub-project that your resource pool can't find. But before we talk about that, here's a tip on avoiding this problem altogether. It's a best practice to keep your resource pool, sub-projects, and master project all in the same folder. That way you can move or copy that folder to anywhere you want without breaking the links between all of these files. But let's say that you haven't done that. So now for some reason, a sub-project can't be found. I'm going to make this problem happen by taking the event project file that I have in the exercise files folder and I'm going to drag it to the desktop. So I've taken it from where it was and where the resource pool expects it to be and I've put it somewhere else. So now let's look at what happens if I go into project and I open up the resource pool. Now I'm going to open the pool and the other sharer files. So I select the third option and click OK. When I do that, it opens up the pool, it opens up the sub-projects it can find, but there's an error message and it says it can't open up one of those sub-projects 'cause it wasn't found. Now the key is to look at the path of where that file is because you need to know where the resource pool is looking. And in this case, it's the exercise files folder on the desktop. So I know where the file needs to be. So I'm going to click OK to close that dialogue box. The resource pool has a link to the sub-project, but the link is broken. So we have to fix the link. I'm going to close all of the files. I'm going to close project. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to move my sub-project back to where the resource pool wants it to be, and that is in the exercise files folder on the desktop. So now I've put it back in place. Well, let's go ahead and open up project again. This time I'm going to open up the resource pool again with a third option to open up the sharer files and then click OK. And notice no errors. So the pool is looking for the file where it thought it was and now that we've moved it back, it's there. From now on, keep the resource pool and the sub-projects in the same folder.