Showing posts with label 2010. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2010. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

No More Project1 !

It is with a lot of emotion that I discovered today that Project1 is no more automatically created in Project 2013 where it was always showing up at Project 2010 start-up!

2010 opening window:



2013 opening window:

For sure, if you're not selecting any project or pushing ESC in the backstage, Project 2013 will create a Project1 for you. But I see as a great improvement to be now able to open a project without always having this Project1 to close before!

I hope you share my enthusiasm!


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Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Manage Calendars using Recurrence Pattern

One of the challenge of planning with MS Project is to be accurate in the dates and vacations.
Though, statutory holidays coming every year needs to be taken into account!

Let's take the example of the 4 of the US holidays found in Wikipedia:
Official Name Date
New Year's Day January 1 (Fixed)
Birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. Third Monday in January
Inauguration Day First January 20 following a Presidential election
Good Friday The Friday before(western) Easter
Interesting in those holidays is that they happen every year. Some can be set recurring, some not:
January first is always the January first (hopefully for those who are partying all New Year eve).
Martin Luther King, Jr. birthday is the 3rd Monday of January. Strange for an anniversary but still, the public holiday is like that.
For the Inauguration Day, this is not possible to predict when it will happen, recurrence will not help in that case
The Good Friday is arriving before Easter, which is again unpredictable and though, the recurrence will not help either.

MS Project and though Project Server is proposing a nice feature in setting recurrence to exceptions in calendar. 
You will first have to go to the Calendar setting:

After creating an exception, while clicking to the details detail button, you will get the following window:

Now, see how to set the above defined recurring and not recurring holidays.
January first:

Martin Luther King, Jr. birthday:

Inauguration Day:

Good Friday:


Now you can declare enterprise calendars with mostly recurring statutory holidays. Some will still need to be entered one by one.
Obviously, this can be configured for Project Server calendars in going to enterprise calendars in the PWA settings

In the next future, I will share with you some calendars until 2020!


Additional note thanks to Gary Chefetz comment:
While creating recurrence, you will have to identify exceptions such as first of January falling on a Sunday. Then a creation of a specific calendar exception will be necessary. The easy way to identify such case would be to check each calendar exception year after year and verify which day it falls.

Furthermore, try to limit your calendars horizon to your projects horizon to not overload the server and the database with unnecessary information


Hope you will love to avoid defining calendar exceptions every year!
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Monday, May 26, 2014

Master the Multiple Choice Custom Fields in your Excel Reports!

It happens sometime that there is a need to report information stored in a Multiple Choice Custom Field:

If this happened to you, you must have seen that the custom field is not part of the standard views such as MSP_Project_UserView.
You will have instead a specific view for each Multiple Choice Custom Field named MSPCFPRJ_<CustomFieldName>_AssociationView.

Then, you will have to write down a clever request giving you the list of choices made by projects.
Don't worry, you can find this clever information right below!
SELECT Proj.ProjectName,
       lt.MemberFullValue AS 'VLookupField'
FROM dbo.MSP_EpmProject_UserView AS Proj 
LEFT OUTER JOIN [dbo].[MSPCFPRJ_<YOUR_CUSTOM FIELD NAME>_AssociationView] AS MVassoc -- view for multi value field 
ON proj.ProjectUID = MVassoc.EntityUID 
LEFT OUTER JOIN dbo.MSP_EpmLookupTable AS lt 
ON MVassoc.LookupMemberUID = lt.MemberUID 
order by    ProjectName asc

I would recommend to do the post treatment in the excel itself. it would be possible to link the below request with the one that will gather all your project information but, be careful, it will multiply the number of lines per the number of choices made on projects.

Then, I recommend to create a specific tab in your excel report to show the information
This will return you something like this while rendered in an Excel pivot table with data connection:
Be sure to have checked the "Repeat All Items Label" check box

Now, you may want to return these information on another sheet gathering other project information.
To do so, I will create a one cell concatenation of the selected project.
First step is to gather the information based on the project on several cells

The formula to gather several lines of a specific project is quite ugly:
{=IF(ISERROR(INDEX($A$1:$B$5000,SMALL(IF($A$1:$A$5000=$G$4,ROW($A$1:$A$5000)),ROW(1:1)),2)),"",INDEX($A$1:$B$5000,SMALL(IF($A$1:$A$5000=$G$4,ROW($A$1:$A$5000)),ROW(1:1)),2))}

$A$1:$B$5000 = Where to search
$A$1:$A$5000 = Where are the project names
$G$4 = The project name to search
1:1 = The line number you want to fetch
Be careful, this is array formulas, that means that you will have to click on CTRL+ENTER to validate your formula!

Here is the overall list of formulas, as you can see, only the parameter number changed (I return here a maximum of 12 entries)

To finish, the easiest part is to put all that in a single cell with the following formula.
To render it nice, I created a second column containing the separator so that a separator is only created while a value is returned. I then concatenated the overall in a cell


Separator cells are looking if there is a value after the current one and if yes displays the separator:
=IF(G6<>"",$H$19,"")

Result cell is a concatenation of the entire table:
=CONCATENATE(G5,H5,G6,H6,G7,H7,G8,H8,G9,H9,G10,H10,G11,H11,G12,H12,G13,H13,G14,H14,G15,H15,G16)

Tips: you can use =CHAR(10) as separator to render in a cell on several lines

You are now able to render multi-choice custom field in your excel services report!

Find here an example of all I just said in an excel file!

Help from Microsoft : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ee767688.aspx
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Friday, May 9, 2014

Do not open Projects in Edit Mode unexpectedly in Project Server 2013


If you are used to open projects in Project Professional in 2010 by double clicking on a project in the open window, you should know that the project is by default opened in edit mode and though checked-out.
Project Server 2013 is bringing here a nice improvement that I, as administrator, am really happy to welcome.
All Projects in Project Professional are by default opened in read-only mode and can be opened in edit whenever you want.


Then, while opened in Read Only , as for Office in 2010 and 2013, Microsoft introduced the "Notification bar" in Project 2013 allowing you to check-out the file.



I already hear you saying: "What about my modifications made while in read-only?". Don't worry, Project is clever enough to just check-out the project without reloading it. Any modification made in read-only mode are kept while checking out the project file


What if a co-worker changed the project in the meantime? Project will ask you to save you changes.


if you choose yes, it will ask you to find a place to save it before checking-out the file


You will have to pay attention while using the "Recent Projects" opening, by default, it will check-out the file for you!





From PWA the options are still the same : while clicking on the little workplan icon, the project will open in Edit mode to your computer MS Project and clicking the project link will open in Read only in PWA.

If you want to open in another manner, you'll have to select the line (not clicking the project link but next to it, this, I guess you're familiar) and select the proper open option from the rubban

You will never again lock a file without noticing it!
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