Ihab Saad – MS Project Session 1 Adding and Linking activities

Music. Welcome to the first video lecture on Microsoft Project. In

this lecture, we're going to be introduced to the software, and

we're going to learn how to add a new project and how to add

activities, link these activities, and how to indent and unindent

activities, and how to schedule our first project.

The first thing to do is, if you go to File

New and click on New, is going to create a new project. And that

way, you can create a new project and add it to your list. Once

we're doing we've done that, we can go to the next tab, which is

task. And as you can see, we have some common Microsoft shortcuts

here, and buttons, Cut, Copy, Paste, format, painter, etc. So

our first view is going to be the Gantt chart where we're going to

enter the activities in both the tabular site, which is on the left

hand side, and the graphic side, which also on the right hand side.

First thing to do we're going to add a new task, and let's call

this task notice to proceed.

The next thing to do is to add the duration for this task. The

duration is going to be set in days. You can add days by clicking

on the up arrow

or remove days by clicking on the down arrow. Let's say the notice

to produce proceed is going to take one day.

My next activity is going to be

surveying

and layout. And

that's going to take three days. We can enter it by clicking on the

keyboard.

And the following activity is going to be mobilization

and setup,

to set up my site, and let's say this is going to take four days.

As you can see, we have entered three activities so far. And you

have here the timeline, the data date or the cutoff date, as of

which I'm entering, my durations. I have here the activities that

appear in these bars, but all the activities appear to be starting

on the same day, which is not exactly what I'm looking forward

to. So what I'm going to do now, I'm going to do two things. I'm

going to click on

link these activities. I'm going to highlight these activities

first, like that, by clicking and pulling down on the mouse, and I'm

going to click on auto schedule.

So auto schedule is going to automatically calculate my

schedule without me entering any dates for the activities. They're

going to be automatically calculation calculated by the

software. So the next step again, my activities appear to be

starting on the same day. So the next thing to do is to link these

activities, and that can be done very easily by clicking on this

link here. Link tasks with the shortcut as Ctrl f2 if I click on

this, it's going to assume a default relationship between the

activities, which is a finish to start relationship.

So now it shows that these activities are going to start as

one activity is going to start as the predecessor has been

completed. And it has automatically scheduled the

durations and the calculated the schedule for this project so far,

and it shows the predecessors as well. Now if I want to change any

of these relationships. It's very simple. I can click on the arrow,

and I can change that from finish to start, into any of the other

relationships, start to start, for example. And I can add some lag

and overlap. So positive is going to be lag,

negative is going to be overlap.

So let's put one day of lag,

and we're going to hit okay.

So now we choose the relationship as being start to start with one

day of lag.

My next step, we can add all the other activities from the

spreadsheet that you have produced, or the word list that

you have produced that shows all the activities in in the proper

sequence, and so on. So now what we're going to do is we're going

to add some other activities here. For example, I'm going to add a an

activity called site work. I'm

not going to enter a duration for this activity, for the time being,

and we're going to see in a minute, why for the site work. I'm

going to say the first step is going to be excavation

and site doubling. I'm.

Yeah, and this is going to take four days.

The next step is going to be

underground

utilities.

These include any water, sewage cables and so on. And let's say

this is going to take five days.

The next activity is going to be for work,

for

SOG slab on grade

following. And that's going to take just one day

following that is going to be rebar

for slab on grade,

and that's going to take three days. And finally, concrete

for slab on grade, and that's going to take one day.

So what we have done so far, we have added a series of activities.

What I want to do is I want to change this task mode into auto

schedule,

instead of manually scheduled. That's the other option where I

can enter dates manually. And then what I'm going to do, I'm going to

select all of these activities here,

and I'm going to indent them as all of these activities are parts

of the site work. So I'm going to indent by clicking on this button.

And now it has calculated

site work as being five days, but that's assuming that all the

activities are going to start at the same time. So the next thing

to do is to link these activities,

and the final thing is to link and now you can see that the site work

is 14 days instead of just five. And now I can link mobilization

and setup to site work.

And there you have.

The activities have been properly indented. I can collapse these

activities to show only one activity for site work, like that.

So now all the site work has been summarized into one activity, and

I can collect I can expand it to show all the activities. This

concludes our lesson number one, in which we have learned about how

to add a new project, how to add activities to the project, how to

automatically link the activities and how to auto schedule allow the

software to calculate the dates by itself, how to create a group of

activities and how to summarize them by indenting them, and then

how to expand these activities and collapsing them depending on the

view that we want to have.

This is the end of Lesson number one. Now you can go ahead and add

your activities in the software, and you can create a new project,

and you can link these activities, and I'm going to be looking

forward to seeing you for lesson number two. Thank you very much.

Thank.