For Microsoft Project to accurately calculate your project schedule, you will need to specify the working days for the project.

Part of this will include adding recurring holidays and any ad-hoc non-working days to the calendar. These ad-hoc nonworking days could for instance be caused by bad weather, a national celebration day, or another project taking priority.

Specify the Working Days for the Project

The default base calendar of MS Project, the Standard calendar, assumes a Monday to Friday working week. However your project working days may differ from this.

We will look to change the calendar to include Saturday as a working day.

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I am often asked in Microsoft Project courses how to automatically change the colour of the task bars in a Gantt Chart dependent upon the tasks resource, or location.

The truth is that this can be a complicated process, but once it is set up it is good to go. Save your view and you will never have to worry about it again.

In this example I plan to format the colour of the task bars by the resource group. I want the colour of the bars to indicate the team that are working on that task. When someone assigns a resource to a task, Project will automatically format the task bar colour in the Gantt Chart.

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Microsoft Project contains many fields for storing information about the tasks and resources of your project. So much so, that it can be hard to imagine what else you would want to know.

However, there is usually a desire to create your own custom fields to display other information in your different views and reports. You can create your own fields to store text, dates, cost and other types of data.

To assist data entry, a field can be created with a drop down list. You can look up the value that you need in a list making data entry easier and more accurate.

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Microsoft Project uses the duration field to calculate the difference between the start and finish dates of a task. But what if you want to sum the durations for all or a set of tasks?

Microsoft Project does not have a field to calculate the total durations for a set of tasks. However this can be easily accomplished by creating a custom field.

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When a change is made to a tasks schedule in Microsoft Project 2010, such as to it’s duration or start date, all the cells in the table that are affected by that change are highlighted with a blue background.

This highlighting of the changed cells brings your attention to what task dates and durations were affected by that scheduling change.

This is a really useful tool, but what if it’s not working? Or maybe you would prefer a different colour to the standard pale blue background?

How to Turn On the Change Highlighting Feature

In Project 2010 the button to turn on the change highlighting is not found on the Ribbon or in the Project options. So to use it we need to add it to the toolbar or Ribbon first. Let’s look at adding it to the Quick Access Toolbar.

1. Click the Customise Quick Access Toolbar button and select More Commands.

2. Click the Popular Commands list arrow and select All Commands.
3. Scroll down the list of commands until you see the Display Change Highlighting command.

4. Select the command and click the Add button to move it to the toolbar.
5. Click Ok.
6. With the button now added to the toolbar, click the Display Change Highlighting button to turn the feature on or off.

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Change the Colour of the Changed Cells

It is possible to change the colour of the changed cells from the standard pale blue background. This background is not easy to see on some monitors, even in some laptops.

1. Click the Format tab under Gantt Chart Tools on the Ribbon.
2. Click the Text Styles button in  the Format group.
3. Select Changed Cells from the Item to Change list.

4. Choose the formatting options of your choice such as the Background Color.
5. Click Ok and your changes will take effect.

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