SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

In my post Practice makes Perfect Part 3 – Views I explained how you can make your own  view. In that post I promised to also show how you can make your own groups and filters. While I expect a lot of people find this easy or just use the default groups and filters it is still useful for beginners.

I will also take the time to go trough the default filters and groups and might be useful on a daily basis.

And again I will be using the preview version of Project Professional 2013 for this post. This is not the final product and changes may still occur. If you are curios about the new version of Microsoft Project go here and try it out for yourself.

So where can I find groups and filters?

There are actually two ways to use groups and filters in your project. When you are in you project select the view tab.

The other ways is in your Gantt Chart and go to Task Name and expand it (Dropdown). As you can see in the image below you are able to select Group By and Filters.

What groups and filters are there?

There are a lot of built in groups and filters. These are very useful to any Project Manager. Some good groups include: Auto scheduled v. Manually scheduled, Status, Milestones and Complete and Incomplete task. These groups are great way to get the information out of your project plan fast.

Some good filters include: Completed tasks, Critical, Incomplete tasks, Late tasks and Milestones. Like groups this is a great way to filter all the data in your project plan.

Using groups and filters is a timesaver when you are working with big project plans and you have to get to the data you want quickly.

How can I make my own Group?

Go to the view tab and select the groups. Expand it and select “New Group By”.

In the next screen you be able to make your group. In the image below I made a easy selection. I will group by milestone to see all the tasks that are milestones. In the order I selected descending to force tasks that are milestones to appear on top. I also have changed the cell background to light blue. Here you also have the ability to show the summary task where the milestones resides just to give you more information. As you can see you also have the ability to group the data by more then one field.

Grouping this way will give you this result.

As you can see this is a really easy way to group your data really quickly. Making this group took me about 1 minute. And if you are a Project Manager that 1 minute will properly save you 15 minutes if you would have to look for all the milestones in a big project plan. Next how to filter.

How can I make my own Filter?

Making your own filter on the same way you made a group. Go to the view tab and select the filter. Expand it and select “New filter” For this exercise I made a quick filter that filters on my own custom field Progress and show the tasks that equals the value Yellow. This basically filters my project plan on tasks that have a yellow smiley.

The image below show the outcome of the filter.

Using Groups and Filters is really easy and can save you a lot of time when working with big project plans. Both the group and filter have been made in about 1 minute.

I hope this post demonstrates how to make groups and filters and how easy it is. When working with big project plans and especially custom fields where you don’t have a filter or group for it is a must to know how to do this so you can access your data fast.

This is it for me. In the next post of Practice makes Perfect will be talking about Costs and Budgets in your project plan.

via SpeakingSilent » Robin Kruithof http://speakingsilent.wordpress.com/2012/09/20/practice-makes-perfect-part-7-groups-and-filters/

I am Robin Kruithof. I am working at CXS in the Netherlands as a Microsoft Project Consultant. My passion lies in Project Management and everything in the Project Management domain. This article has been cross posted from speakingsilent.wordpress.com/ (original article)