Breaking Up Your Work in Microsoft Project - Creating and Modifying a WBS on the Fly
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If you’re in high gear churning out project tasks, you can gleefully insert, delete, and rearrange the WBS outline as you go. The resulting WBS looks exactly the same as one methodically typed from the top down. Also, the methods for adding, moving, and changing outline levels for tasks are the same whether you’re creating or modifying a WBS.
Figure 4-6. In Project 2007, visual reports can make project information easier to digest by displaying the data in Excel or Visio. This visual report using Visio takes the tasks in a Project file and displays them as a WBS tree structure. As you’ll learn in Chapter 17, you can use other types of visual reports to decompose project information, for instance, or to analyze cost and schedule overruns to identify problems areas.
You can use the following techniques to develop a WBS in any order:
- Insert a new summary task. In the row below the new summary task, click the Task Name cell, and then press Insert. Type the task name, and then either press Alt+Shift+left arrow or, on the Formatting toolbar, click Outdent until the summary task is at the level you want.
- Insert a new subtask. Click the Task Name cell in the row that should be below the new subtask, and then press Insert. The task appears at the same outline level as the task you clicked.
- Make a summary task into a subtask. Select the summary task, and then either press Alt+Shift+right arrow or, on the Formatting toolbar, click Indent (the green arrow pointing to the right). When you indent a summary task, its outline box disappears. In addition, the task above it remains at the same level in the outline.
- Move a subtask to the next lower level. Select the task, and then press Alt+Shift+Right Arrow or, on the Formatting toolbar, click Indent. The task drops to the next lower level while the task above it turns into a summary task.
Tip: If you want to move, indent, outdent, or delete several tasks at once, then select them all, and then use the techniques in this section. To select adjoining tasks in the outline, drag across the adjacent tasks. To select several separate tasks, Ctrl+click each task.
- Move a subtask to another summary task. Click the ID cell (the first column of the view table) for the task you want to move. After the pointer turns into a four-headed arrow, drag the task to its new home in the outline. Change its outline level if necessary.
- Delete a subtask. Select the subtask, and then press Delete.
- Delete a summary task. If you want to delete a summary task and all of its subtasks, select the summary task, and then press Delete, or choose Edit -> Delete Task. (And if you want to delete a summary task and keep all of the subtasks, see the box below.)
Note: To use the Delete key to delete a task, you must select the entire task row (by clicking the ID number for the row). If you select only the Task Name cell, and then press Delete, Project deletes the text in the cell. Alternatively, if you click the Smart Tag with an X, which appears to the left of the Task Name cell, you can choose the “Only clear the contents of the Task Name Cell” option or “Delete the entire task” option.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION
Sparing the Subtasks
How do delete a summary task without deleting its subtasks?
It depends on what you want to do with the subtasks. If you want to shift the subtasks to a different summary task, it’s easiest to first relocate the subtasks to their new home. Then you can delete the empty summary task by selecting it, and then pressing Delete.
However, if you’re not yet where you want the orphaned subtasks to end up, simply change them to the same outline level as the summary task before deleting the summary task.
Here's how:
Select the subtasks by dragging across their Task Name cells.
Press Alt+Shift+left arrow to change the tasks to the same outline level as their summary task. You can tell that the summary task is devoid of subtasks because the outline box with the + or – sign disappears.
Select the summary task demoted to a regular task, and then press Delete.
Please check back next week for the conclusion to this article.
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 This article is excerpted from chapter four of the book Microsoft Project 2007: The Missing Manual, written by Bonnie Biafore (O'Reilly, 2007; ISBN: 0596528361). Check it out today at your favorite bookstore. Buy this book now.
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