Project 2003 Personal Trainer

Lesson 2.4. Entering a Milestone

Your project will be full of tasks that need to be completed by the time you're done with it, but it's also important to track events that occur in your project. In this example, finishing the book and sending it to the publisher is a big deal. Such events are milestones, tasks that mark significant events in your project. Milestones can also be used to mark a deadline or some other type of restriction imposed on the project.

Though milestones don't require any work, they are useful additions to the project.

1. Click the Duration field for the "Send courseware to O'Reilly" task.

   This task is a significant marking point in the project.

   There are two ways to change a task into a milestone: enter a duration of 0 (zero) days in the duration field, or mark the task as a milestone in the Task Information dialog box.

2. Type 0 days and press Enter.

   The "Send courseware to O'Reilly" task has been changed into a milestone, as shown in Figure 2-4.

   The milestone in this example is ideal, because sending something at its completion is an indicator of progress, but it doesn't really take much time to do.

Milestones are very easy to use. Don't be afraid to use them as markers for the beginning or ending of a task. You might even want to use them as reference pointsfor example, to mark the halfway point of a project's progress.