Special Edition Using Microsoft Office Project 2003

Displaying Detail Headers

I can't tell what data field is displayed in the timephased data of the Resource Usage view because there are no headers for the rows. How can I tell which rows contain which fields?

There are two reasons why you might not see the detail headers:

• The width of the detail headers column might have been accidentally or deliberately reduced to zero. Try positioning the mouse just slightly to the right of the border that separates the Resource Sheet view and the Timescale grid in the timescale header at the top of the view, and drag the mouse to the right to expand the Details column again.

• You might have suppressed the display of the headers in the Detail Styles dialog box. With the Resource Usage view active, choose Format, Detail Styles and click the Usage Properties tab. The Display Details Header Column box must contain Yes in order for the headers to be displayed.

Sorting Assignments in the Resource Allocation View

In the Resource Allocation view, the list of assignments in the top pane under a resource name is not in the same order as the list in the bottom pane, and this makes it hard to find the task in the bottom pane. How can I get them in the same order?

Activate the top pane and choose Project, Sort, By ID to have Project sort the top pane by ID number. The lists should then be in sync. If not, activate the bottom pane and sort it by ID also.

Level Now Seems Not to Be Working

I used the Level Now command, but there are still overallocated resources, even though Project didn't give me any alerts saying it was unable to resolve an overallocation . What did I do wrong?

The Level Now command tackles only overallocations that trigger the Leveling indicator. So if your project has the leveling sensitivity set to Week by Week, for example, there might still be resources that are overallocated on an hour-by- hour or day-by-day basis.

Another reason is that resources may have been assigned to both summary tasks and the detail tasks . In this instance, the overallocation cannot possibly be resolved because it is impossible to delay a summary task without also delaying the detail tasks that make up that summary task. As a general rule, you should try to avoid assigning resources to summary tasks and detail tasks. You should assign resources either at summary level only or at detail task level only. The only exception to this is when you want to assign someone as being responsible for the task, but that person may or may not be doing any work on the detail tasks. In this instance, you can assign a resource to a summary task but assign the resource with 0h work.

Managing Preleveled Taskbars

I entered a leveling delay for a task in the Leveling Gantt Chart view, but Microsoft Project doesn't show the preleveled taskbar for the task.

The preleveled taskbar is based on the dates in the Preleveled Start and Preleveled Finish fields. These fields contain NA until you use the Level Now command for the first time; therefore, you don't see these bars until you use the Level Now command. You can't edit the dates in these fields because they can only be calculated by Microsoft Project. You can hide the Preleveled bar if you choose Format, Bar Styles and delete the bar from the display or choose a clear bar style that will not show onscreen.