Communicating Your Project Without Microsoft Project.

You've spent a great deal of time working and refining your project plan and are ready to communicate it to others in your team who may or, as often the case, may not have access to Microsoft Project. Communicating the project effectively is key to the project's success and with all the task, resources, dates and times locked into Microsoft Project you may find that you are unable to share this information. Project therefore includes tools for communicating your project using other applications such as Word, PowerPoint or even publishing it on a webpage. One of these tools is the Copy Picture to Office Wizard.

The first step is to customise the screen view to contain all the applicable information required for your presentation. For example if you are preparing to export the Gantt chart, you may want to only show certain tasks and remove some of the many columns in the table as not all of them will be relevant. To hide a column, right click the column title and select Hide Column or drag the dividing line between the table and the Gantt chart so more Gant chart is shown and less table. Speaking of tables, there are many different tables available with different information relating to task usage, resource usage etc. To select the correct table click the View menu and then the name of the current table eg. Table:Entry or Table :Schedule. A submenu of tables is shown, select the required table. To select specific tasks, together with the Ctrl key on the keyboard, click the required task ID Nos.

The Copy Picture to Office Wizard enables you to export complex project data to an image that you can use in another application like Word or PowerPoint. This wizard can be found on the Analysis Toolbar. When you first start the wizard, you'll be asked if you want to keep the original outline level. This defines the level of Summary tasks and Subtasks that you will display as there may be no need to show all the detailed tasks, so showing summary tasks or tasks down to a specific level may suffice for your requirements. The next page of the Wizard, (entitled Specify Image creation Options) will depend on the selected view i.e. a Gantt chart options will be different from Resource Usage. Select whether the picture should include rows currently on screen, the rows which have been selected or all rows in the current view. Next, select the timescale required, what's on screen now, the entire project (not recommended unless very short project) or between two dates. Next you can specify the maximum size of the image.

On the next page of the Wizard you can preview the image in Internet Explorer prior to exporting it in the desired orientation (landscape or portrait) to the application you select at the bottom of the page of the Wizard. The next page of the Wizard will allow you to select the Microsoft Project fields from the various tables. Click the required field(s) in the list on the left, (Microsoft Office Project fields) and click on the Add button so the required field(s) appear in the list on the right, (Fields to Export.) Click Finish to initiate the export. Once the Wizard is closed, the selected Office Application is opened and the picture shown.

There is a slightly different procedure to create an image for a web page. Start of by preparing the Project view in the same way as above, which columns, rows, outline etc. Once this is complete, click the Report Menu and select Copy Picture. As a rule, for a Web page, you will want to create a Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) image. A GIF image is widely used for transmitting images across the Internet. Click the Browse button to choose a location where the GIF image will be saved. Once again, choose whether the GIF image will include the rows currently on display on the screen or any rows that are selected. You should also choose a time scales which are as shown on the screen (default) or between two dates. The image will then be exported to the selected location, ready for inclusion on a web page using your HTML editor.

In this article we've looked at how we can effectively communicate our project to colleagues who may not have access to Microsoft Project.