From the course: Microsoft Project Tips Weekly

Store customized elements where you want

From the course: Microsoft Project Tips Weekly

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Store customized elements where you want

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- [Bonnie] Hi, I'm Bonnie Biafore. In this tip, I'll show you how to tell Project where to store the elements you customize and why. You usually want custom views, tables, filters, and groups in the global template. That way, they're available to every Project file you open. Project is setup by default to do that and let me show you how that works. I'm going to go up to the file tab and then on the left side click options. In the Project options dialogue box, you want to go to the advanced category and then scroll down until you see the display section. There's an option near the bottom of that section automatically add new views, tables, filters, and groups to the global and it's turned on. So that's what you usually want. Let's click OK to close the dialogue box and just see how this works. So I have a project here and I've got the Gantt chart open, but let's say that I want to create a custom view that I want to use for all projects. On the task tab, I'm going to click the bottom half of the Gantt chart button over here on the left. And then at the bottom of the dropdown menu, choose save view. So I'm going to save this built-in Gantt chart view as a new view and the name I'm going to give it is C-BigPic 'cause I want like a big picture of my project. When I click OK, now Project has saved the custom view and as it turns out a custom table to go along with it. If you look over on the left-hand side, you can see the name of the view. And if I click the bottom half of the Gantt chart button, the view appears in the custom section. Likewise, if I go to the view tab and click the tables button, I can see a custom section as well with the table that Project created for me. I'm going to click away and just make one small change to this view. I'm going to right click the timescale heading and then on the shortcut menu choose timescale and what I want to do in the middle tier of this timescale is change the months to quarters. So in the units box I click the down arrow and choose quarters. Then for the bottom tier, I'm going to do the same thing except I'm changing the units from weeks to months. When I click OK, now I get a much more compact view of what's happening in the project. Well, let's go and see where Project stored things. I'm going to go up to the file tab and then click the organizer button. In the organizer dialogue box, if we look over on the right side which shows the active project, you can see I've got my custom view because I'm on the views tab after all. It's C_BigPic. But in addition, on the left side, we've got Global.MPT. That's the name for the global template and it really is just a special project template file that holds customizations. And there's our custom view. So Project saved the view in both places. If I go to the tables tab, it did the same thing with the custom table. Now I'm going to close the organizer and create a brand new project file. So over on the left side, I'll click new and then click the big blank project button. Now I haven't done anything to this project file at all. Let's go up to the Gantt chart button, click the bottom half and you can see that my custom view is available to this project as well because it's in the global template. That's why this is what you normally want to do. Now at this point you may wonder, "Well, why wouldn't I want to save things "in the global template?" There are times when you don't want to get your custom elements in the global template. For example, with the things that I do where I do a lot of training or how to movies, I don't want custom elements in the global template because that means when I show the organizer on the screen or for that matter a dropdown menu, I will have those elements but the students won't and that's really confusing. For that reason, I will turn off that option so that I'm not saving things in the global template. If I go to the file tab and then click options, go to advanced, I just turn that checkbox off automatically add new views, tables, filters, and groups to the global and click OK. Now if I save a custom view in this blank project, I can do that just like we did before. Click the bottom half of the Gantt chart button and choose save view. I can call it C_MyEyesOnly and click OK. Well, I've got my custom view and you know I've got a custom table. But if I go to the organizer again, remember that's up on the file tab and click organizer, now when we look at the views tab in the organizer dialogue box, there's the custom view in the active project, but it's not in the global template. The great news is when you're done and you want to go back to saving things in your global template, you can always turn the option back on. I can just go to options, the advanced category, and turn the checkbox automatically add new views, tables, filters, and groups to the global, turn that on and click OK. And that's how you control where your customized elements are stored.

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