 Welcome to Microsoft Project 2013 Part 2. My name is Debbie Fierst and I'll be your instructor. I've been teaching Microsoft Project since it was first introduced in the early 1990s. Not only that, but I have managed all sorts of projects from small to large, and I look forward to sharing my information with you. In this unit, we'll learn how to manage the Microsoft Project environment. We'll specifically look at linking projects, how to set a baseline in a project, and how to work with custom fields. In this topic, we'll learn how to link projects. In Microsoft Project, you should already be familiar with the capacity to link tasks. So here we have an example of task A being linked to task B. We call this link a dependency, and typically you see an arrow joining the two tasks, and it indicates the type of dependency between those two tasks. So these two tasks happen to be in a finished to start relationship. Well, that's nice that we can link tasks together, but what makes Microsoft Project so powerful is the capacity to link whole projects. So maybe my project stands alone and has nothing to do with any other project, but maybe I'm in a situation where different departments or different individuals throughout my organization are handling different parts of a project inside of their own Microsoft Project files, and we need to bring those together. This is called a master project. We would create a master project and then insert what are called sub-projects. So each person would be responsible for a sub-project and we would bring them together in a master project. Then what we can do is we can create links between those projects. Individual tasks in one project plan can then be linked to an individual task in another project plan. In order to create a master and sub-project scenario, you create your master file, just a regular old Microsoft project file. It doesn't have to have anything in it, and then you go to the project tab on your menu and select in the insert group sub-project. What is going to happen when you do that is it'll bring up a dialog box for you to navigate in your file system to the project that you want to insert as a sub-project. This could be out on your SkyDrive, it could be in SharePoint, it could be on a local hard drive. Wherever that file might reside, you go and navigate to that file. Then you have some decisions to make. Once you locate the file, how do you want to insert it? Notice there is a box here that says link to project and you can check or uncheck that box. You also have a drop-down list next to insert here and you have two choices, insert and insert read only. So let's discuss those three options. If you check the box that says link to project and you choose insert, you are creating a two-way link between your sub-project and your master project. What that means is that if you make any changes in the sub-project or the master project file, it is going to be reflected in the other version of the file. So in other words, if I navigated out to my C-Drive in a folder called test, that's where my sub-project resides and my master project is on the C-Drive in a folder called master. I really have two copies of that sub-project folder. I have the one that still sits out on test and I have the one that is part of my master file. So this sort of link is going to mean that any changes made in either copy will be reflected in the other. If you check the box that says link to project and you pick insert read only, you're creating a one-way link between the sub-project and the master project. What that means is that any changes in the sub-project will be reflected in the master, but changes in the master will not be reflected down in the sub-project. This is a lot of times what gets used when you're in a situation where you've got a lot of different departments responsible for their sub-projects. They don't want you and your master making changes to their sub-project. They want to make those changes. They're responsible for that and they just want you to see any changes that are made. So this is a very common choice right there. And then you have a third option where you don't check the link to project box at all and you just select insert. What that's going to do is just insert a copy of the sub-project but there's no links, no changes made in one version will be reflected in the other. Now if I have created a master project and sub-project situation, I would not be able to at a glance tell what links those projects together. And so Microsoft has provided a nice tool for us to be able to see the links. What we do is we click on the project tab and down here in the properties group we click on links between projects. It brings up a dialog box that looks like this and the key here is that we might have links that are predecessors, we may have links that are successors. Let me refresh you on what that means. If I have a task, let me represent a task as a bar here. Okay, that task may be linked to prior tasks. And if that's the case, this is a predecessor, right? If this task is linked to a future task, that future task would be called a successor. Okay, so what they have done here is they have given you a way to see predecessors and successors. So what this is showing us is that task four in the master project is related to sub-project task 2C.