Cynthia Snyder

Several views in Project 2016 include gridlines to indicate certain elements, such as a break between weeks or the status date (that is, the date to which progress has been tracked on a project). These lines help someone reading the plan to discern intervals of time or breaks in information; for example, gridlines can be used to indicate major and minor column breaks.

Project 2016 allows you to customize the Gantt chart in several ways. Taskbars are the horizontal boxes that represent the timing of tasks in the Chart pane of Gantt Chart view. You can format a bar individually, change the formatting settings on different types of taskbars, or apply a new style that controls bar formatting on the entire chart.

From time to time, you have to hit the brakes on a project in Project 2016. For example, you may set up an entire project schedule, and just as you're ready to start rolling, the project is put on hold, caused by a budget shortfall, priorities that have changed, resources being pulled to another project, or cold feet on the part of stakeholders.

To resolve problems with resource assignments in your Project 2016 projects, you have to first figure out where the problems lie by taking a look at a few views that focus on resource assignment.Resource Usage view, shown in the first figure below, and Resource Graph view, shown in the second figure, are useful in helping you spot overbooked resources.

Contingency reserve is either time or money that is factored into the schedule or the budget to mitigate identified risks. A risk is an uncertain event or condition that, if it occurs, affects the schedule (or another project objective, such as cost, resources, or performance). The proper way to deal with uncertainty on a project is to conduct a thorough risk analysis.

When you work with auto-scheduled tasks, Project 2016 can reschedule them for you when you establish task dependencies. Because the start and finish dates of manually scheduled tasks are hard-wired (fixed), Project loses the useful ability to move them around when predecessor task schedules change.Even though Project can't automatically move manually scheduled tasks, it performs forecasted calculations for completing each manually scheduled task based on the task's links and other drivers.

The Project 2016 AutoFilter feature is turned on by default for all new schedule files. Arrows appear in the column headings in the displayed sheet. When you click the arrow in the Resource Names column, for example, the name of every resource assigned to tasks in the project is listed in alphabetical order, along with other filtering and sorting choices.

You don't have to use predesigned filters in Project 2016: You can get creative and design your own filters. To define a new filter, you specify a field name, a test, and a value.For example, the following line filters for any task on the critical path: Critical (field name) Equals (test) Yes (value) You can also include additional qualifiers to the filter.

Filters in Project 2016 work similarly to the Zoom feature in a word processor: They give you a close-up look at various aspects of your plan and help you spot clues about problems, such as overallocated resources. You can set a filter to highlight tasks or resources that meet certain criteria or to remove from view any tasks or resources that don't meet the criteria.