Launch Project 2007 the first time and you'll see the Project Guide on the left of the display complete with toolbar. This guide is one of several Project 2007 startup options described in this article. Other useful startup options are described along with guidance on where you can change these options.

The Project Guide

The Project Guide can be a very useful help facility to assist in the Project creation process, with its clear drop down menus under the categories Tasks, Resources, Track and Report.

Click the pop downs to the right of each of these headings and you'll see the detailed topics the guide can assist you with. Choose one and the guide panel opens showing text based help, often accompanied by clickable links of buttons which guide you further through carrying out actions.

You can turn off the guide help panel by clicking the cross on the upper right of the panel or click the button on the far right of the guide toolbar. Should you want to turn off the Project Guide toolbar you choose View, Toolbars, Project Guide.

If you want to stop the Project Guide launching on Project startup, with Project open you choose Tools, Options and select the Interface tab. In the left side of the tab untick the checkbox "Display Project Guide" and click OK to finish. Now with Project remaining open, as your create new Project files, the guide will not show. If you return to the Interface tab, you'll see a button "Set as Default". Click this, and the project guide will never start whenever Project is launched in the future.

Prompt for Project Information for new projects

By default when a new project file is created, a panel appears titled Project Information for the project filename. This allows you to change such things as start date, current date and calendar, as well as change the project schedule basis from start date to finish date. If you tend to accept the default settings in this panel of start date today and schedule based on start date, with standard calendar you may want to turn off this prompt. To do this choose Tools, Options and select the General tab. Then untick the checkbox "Prompt for project info for new projects". Again you also have the option of clicking the button "Set as Default" to make this change permanent.

Setting Date/Time Format

Depending how you want to view project fields such as start and finish, you can set the date/time format accordingly. So, for example, if you want to view date and time, you choose Tools, Options and select the View tab. The date format box is the third box down from the top of the tab. Click the down arrow to the right of the box to choose your preferred format, such as date and time, then click OK to finish. Note that you cannot change the defaults on this tab, but the format you choose will be applied to the current project file. Back in the Gantt Chart view you'll need to autofit the table columns to display the changed date and time format.

Show Project Summary Task

If you enable this feature, your current project file will show an additional summary task right at the start which covers the entire project start and finish. The project summary task shows as grey to distinguish it from the regular summary tasks which as black, and the task name shown in the table is the current file name. Changing the file name will automatically change this task name. The benefit of showing the Project Summary Task is that you can easily see the overall project start, finish and duration details.

Hide Change Highlighting

Project 2007 has a very useful new feature called Change Highlighting. This feature highlights in the Gantt Chart tasks table all the changes resulting from adding or editing any task. So if you do add a new task or edit an existing one, all the affected tasks will show with a light blue background.

Carry out another change and the highlighted blue backgrounds switches to tasks affected by this latest change. So you'll see that this highlighting feature always shows changes resulting from the latest task change. You can turn this feature off if you wish. To do so, just select View, then choose "Hide Change Highlighting". The Change Highlighting setting you choose will remain as default in Project.

These are just some of Project's many features which you can enable or disable when Project launches. Making the right choices can help you create the most effective projects to suit your needs. You might like to consider learning more about Microsoft Project. One very effective way is to attend a training course. This way you can build on your Project skills in a very short time and take your Project usage to the next level.