 In this training video we're going to look at linking two individual projects together which are by themselves they're not in the master project they just happen to be two individual projects. The ones I'm going to link is car 1 and car 3. So I'm going to double-click car 1 to have a quick look at it first so I can see it's starting in January or 1 and it's going on to February the end of February. So I'm now going to link the mechanical task which I'll just shade in this example so I'll make it yellow. I'm going to link this mechanical task the yellow one in car 1 to the mechanical task within car 3. Now before I do this I need to find out the path of where car 3 has already been saved. So I'm now going to find the path within car 3 and I'll paste it in the car 1 for the mechanical task so that's what I'm about to do now. So I'm going to go to my car 3 and again it's the same duration 27 days and it's starting in the same date so they're identical start dates and duration. So I can find the path of this project. I go to the file tab under the info section I can go for project information and choose advanced properties. I can go to general and I can now see the path of this project. So car 3 is telling me is the project and this location is in the C drive and it's in a couple of folders and the last folder is linking projects. So I'm going to copy this location and I'm using control C to copy it. I'm now going to cancel this and I've now got the path now of car 3 so I'm going to close it down for the time being. I'm still in car 1 now. I'm now going to go to the mechanical task within car 1. I'm going to double click and go to the predecessor section and I'm now going to form the link to car 3. So sometimes you've got to put some kind of number in the ID and then fox it a little bit by taking the backspace so the cursor is now flashing in the ID area so sometimes I put a number in because sometimes the cursor doesn't appear within the ID column. All I'm now going to do is control V and paste. So now I've got the link from car 3 but now I've got to tell this link to actually go to car 3 so I'm going to do a follow the process forward slash and then I'm going to write in car 3 and the way it was saved was car space 3. Another forward slash I'm going to tell it before the forward slash I'm going to get rid of that backspace. You've also got to tell it the file extension so I'm going to go dot mpp that's Microsoft project so you've got to tell it the actual name of the project but it's got to also have its extension so dot mpp now another forward slash and now I'm going to put in 7 so that means it's going to link to task 7 within the car 3 project. If I click one line down it now tells me I'm forming an external task link so it knows that I'm going to another project so that's what that's telling me. If I click OK I can now see a gray task within car 1. This means an external task link has now been created. Now this is going to car 3. Now I can open up car 3 by actually following the grayed out task which is just above the yellow shaded task so I'm going to double click the grayed out mechanical task which is the external task and this now tells me I'm in car 3 but car 3 is now saying to me well as of now it hasn't accepted the link yet so it's now saying I need to update this project through the link between projects box which now appeared so I'm going to click on the mechanical and I can now accept all and now click all to accept all of them so we can see there's no gray bar in here yet and no gray task but as soon as we click all and now close we now have the link following through so now car 1 and car 3 are now linked with a finished start link so we might say we might want the link to change so we could go back to car 1 so I'm I'm going to go back to my car 1 if I look at the links I can now see I've got an external link on car 1 for the mechanical task the yellow task and I can see the external path that's been created a bit more I've got the path and now I've got the path so it's linking to task 7 of the car 3 project now I'm going to change this link to a start to start so I'm going to minimize I'm going to double click the mechanical task within car 1 and I'm going to change it to a start to start okay now in the car 1 the change has gone through straight away now I'm going to look at my car 3 car 3 has also changed straight away that's because the project was open if the car 3 project wasn't open and I've closed it I'd have had to use the link between box again to update the link for the change because I'd left the car 3 project open in this particular example the link now has reflected so this shows how tasks can be linked between two individual projects using the external tasks and copying paths from one project to another project to link these tasks together and knowing that a grayed out task bar and grayed out information in the project means an external task and that means it's linked from another project so this completes the demonstration on how to link external tasks together between two individual projects if you enjoyed this video make sure you like and subscribe to our channel hope to see you for the next tutorial and thanks for watching