Microsoft Project 2013 Fundamentals

Quick Facts

Delivery Method Online
Professional Certificate
24hrs Suggested Study Time
3 Months Access
Tutor Support
Study On Any Device
272 Students

Discover how to effectively plan, implement, manage, and control projects using the world's most popular project management software.

Discover how to effectively plan, implement, and control projects using the world's most popular project management software, Microsoft Project 2013. From sequencing tasks, producing a baseline, and assigning resources and costs, to tracking progress, analysing variances, and revising your project plan, Microsoft Project can help you organise all your project's details quickly and effectively.

In this course, you'll master the basics of Microsoft Project 2013 so you can create a project schedule in no time flat and then share it with clients and co-workers. Using the program's different views, such as the Calendar and Gantt chart views, you'll be able to manage your project information and produce effective reports. Armed with this information, you'll avoid going down dead-end alleys and overloading your schedule. And should you encounter trouble, you'll master a number of tried-and-true problem-resolution techniques to help get your project back on track.

You'll also learn how to fine-tune different aspects of your project, including splitting tasks for work interruptions and defining material consumption rates. After completing the course, you'll know how to develop, implement, and control a project plan that meets organisational and customer objectives.

Courses are delivered to you through expertly executed lessons, online instruction and interaction with like-minded students. Our courses are designed to deliver all of the benefits of studying in a classroom whilst giving you the flexibility to study at a time and place to suit your needs. You can access your classroom 24/7 from any device with an internet connection.

This course has a 3 month duration. You'll complete comprehensive lessons, quizzes and assignments before submitting your final exam at the end of the course to achieve your certificate. Courses must be completed within the 3 month access period.

Microsoft Project can help you manage your project's schedule, costs, and scope in a way that you've never dreamed of. Too often, Project users never use this powerful tool to its fullest potential. In your first lesson, you'll discover how to improve your project by adopting a formal management approach. You'll get a quick overview of Project Management, and then you'll learn the basics of Microsoft Project, including a summary of the Gantt Chart view and ways to create and enter project tasks.

If you're looking for ways to keep organized, you'll see just how to do that in today's lesson! We'll walk through steps to create a project schedule in no time flat. Once you create and enter tasks in Project's Gantt Chart view, you'll set a schedule by using a calendar and assigning lead times. Then, you'll need to create task dependencies, sometimes known as links. You'll see how to perform these activities and, in the process, you'll become comfortable using Project's many dialog boxes. Before you know it, you'll be creating schedules for all your projects with little effort.

<p>You won't get too far with your project without adding resources. While tasks create the backbone of your project, people, equipment, and material bring your project to life. In this lesson, you'll find out how to apply two types of Project resources—work resources, and material resources. We'll look at two more dialog boxes—Resource Information and Assign Resources—and you'll learn how to analyze resources by using the Resource Sheet and Resource Usage views. </p> <div><br> </div>

<P>No matter what project you work on, the bottom line is always important. So get ready to add the final piece to your basic project schedule—costs. We'll start things off by looking through a brief overview of cost accounting, exploring fixed, variable, relevant, and accrued costs. After this review, you'll learn how to assign costs by using the Resource Sheet. You'll even discover how to assign different costs for the same resource and analyze the overall costs for your project by using the Cost Table. </P> </H1>

Successful project managers are known for their efficiency and for safeguarding private information. Microsoft Project provides two excellent methods to help you in these areas: project templates and project security. You'll find out how to use some of the many templates Project has to offer, including the Residential Construction template and the New Product template. You'll also learn how to protect your project information with backups, passwords, and write protection. Then you'll discover how to put Project's task constraints to good use.

In this lesson, you'll discover how easy it is to modify your basic schedules and work with project data. You'll look at the various Project views, such as the Calendar, Leveling Gantt, and the Network Diagram. And if you don't like the default colors or fonts in your schedule or table, you'll be well-prepared to make changes. You'll even learn how and why you might want to create a combination view; add notes to your project; or sort, filter, and group data.

Many projects experience schedule compression when management or clients ask that the project be completed sooner and for less. In today's lesson, you'll discover how to improve your schedule's performance. You'll explore the Project Statistics dialog box, and you'll learn how to determine the ideal starting point in terms of planned costs and completion dates. You'll see how to change task dependencies to speed up your project and also find out how to split tasks to add more lead time. You'll also learn how to create recurring tasks and attach notes to your project's taskbars.

Before you implement your project, you need to create a baseline. This will help you track actual results against what you originally set out to accomplish. Microsoft Project makes it possible to set up a baseline with a few mouse clicks. You'll learn how to create a baseline and then see a variety of ways, including using the Tracking toolbar, to record your actual project results.

Here's where things really start to come together! You'll learn how to compare actual results to your baseline by using the Gantt Chart and reviewing a table. You'll discover how useful status identifiers and progress lines can be to quickly gain information about your project's position. You'll also begin using the Tracking Gantt and filters to automatically identify slipping tasks. You'll also take a stroll through the basics of variance analysis by discussing the Start and Finish Date, Resources, and Work Variance Tables.

Once your project gets rolling, outsiders will probably want to know how things are going. It can be a real time drain answering each request individually. When others request information from you, Microsoft Project offers the perfect solution: Reports. We'll go over a representative sample of the standard reports as well as discuss how to modify and create new reports in today's lesson. By the time you finish, you'll be well acquainted with Project's reporting capabilities and also know how to create Visual Reports as Project automatically exports data to Microsoft Excel and Visio.

Now that you're using reports to share project information, you'll occasionally need to print various views and tables. In this lesson, you'll delve into printing Microsoft Project documents. You'll be a master at creating different views of your project with the Page Setup dialog box, and you'll clearly understand the mechanics of the Print dialog box and the Print Preview.

No project is complete until it's officially closed. In this final lesson, you'll find out how to close your project and use the Organizer to help you customize and copy views for future projects.

Tony Swaim

Tony Swaim has helped many clients, colleagues, and students reach their professional and personal goals. He has been an online instructor since 1998 and has taught at colleges and universities across the United States since 1981. His focus areas ... Read more

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Frequently Asked Questions

Once you've made the payment, we'll send you a confirmation email with a link to start your course. Feel free to get started whenever you're ready!

You'll have 3 months access to your course. In that time you are free to study at your own pace. The course duration is 24 hours.

Online learning is a flexible way to study that fits around your schedule, giving you the freedom to learn at your own pace from anywhere in the world. You'll have 3 months to complete the course and can take the multiple-choice questions and final exam whenever it suits you.

If you need help, you can contact us anytime. You can also join the discussion area where you can interact with other students. The discussion area for each lesson is open for the entire duration of the course.

Of course! We offer a 7-day money back guarantee. As long as you haven't completed the course, you can get a full refund within 7 days of enrolling.

We do not offer extensions or transfers for this self-paced course. However, you will have 3 months to complete the course, and if you need to cancel within the first 10 days of enrolment, we offer a money back guarantee.

What people are saying about our courses

This is the second course I have taken with Tony Swaim, and I like his teaching style. I will look for other opportunities to take courses for which he is the instructor in the future.

Verified Student

This course is valuable in many ways. It was highly informative, practical, and written in a way that I could understand with no prior business or project management degree. Makes me want to learn more about project management and possibly sign up for some more classes.

Verified Student

Once again, a great course.

Verified Student

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The Learning Environment

From the moment that you enrol in the Microsoft Project 2013 Fundamentals you will become an integral part of our learning community. You'll find yourself with the freedom to learn at a speed that suits you, on any device, from anywhere in the world. Achieving your career goals no longer has to mean compromising family and work commitments.

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Microsoft Project 2013 Fundamentals

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Crystal Reports 10 Fundamentals

Quick Facts

Delivery Method Online
Professional Certificate
24hrs Suggested Study Time
3 Months Access
Tutor Support
Study On Any Device
6056 Students

Make the points you want to make by converting raw database or accounting information into impressive and meaningful reports.

Discover the secret techniques pros use to produce handsome reports that clearly convey almost any type of information to any type of audience. This class will help you unleash the hidden power of Crystal Reports to present database or accounting information in a way that unmistakably communicates the points you want to make.

If you have information you need to intelligently communicate to others, but cannot do so because it lies buried in your database, accounting program, or other data source, you need Crystal Reports--and this course.

It doesn't matter whether you need to develop a quick-turnaround report that your boss needed yesterday or an elaborate financial report for your company's annual report. Crystal Reports can handle it all, and your instructor will show you how.

You'll discover how to extract the data you want your report to include, how to sort it into the order you want, how to group related information together, and how to include totals for groups of figures or for the entire report. All the while, you'll gain valuable firsthand experience with the process of creating, running, and publishing polished, professional quality reports.

NOTE: If you have Crystal Reports XI, 2008, or 2011, then you should enroll in ""Crystal Reports Fundamentals"" rather than this course. Please check the Requirements for further information.

Crystal Reports is the world's most popular software tool for creating reports based on data stored in databases. It's popular because of its power and flexibility, which will help you create reports that communicate the information you want to convey to the people you want to convey it to. In our first lesson, you'll learn why it's important to find out everything you need to know about the report you want to create before you even launch the Crystal Reports application. This advance planning gives you a much better chance of creating a report that achieves your objectives.

In this lesson, we'll hit the ground running and create a Crystal report from scratch. You'll learn how to connect to any of several different types of data sources, pull data from the data source, and place it into a report. Then you'll learn how easy Crystal Reports makes giving your report a professional appearance with a report header, page headers, page footers, and a report footer, in addition to column headings and the data itself. You'll also learn how to arrange all these items on a page for maximum visual impact.

Once you know how to pull data from a database and display it in a basic report, the next step is pulling data from multiple tables and displaying only the data you want, filtering out any irrelevant information. In this lesson, you'll learn how to perform all those functions, including building reports that allow the user to decide at runtime what to display. In effect, you can build one report that serves the purpose of multiple reports.

Displaying the information in a database is one thing—displaying it in a way that communicates effectively is another. One important way to enhance communication is to organize the data in a meaningful way. In today's lesson, you'll learn how to sort a report's data and how to group related data items together. You'll learn how to summarize numerical data with group totals and obtain an overall grand total. We'll also look into Crystal Reports' drilldown capability, which allows your report readers to use a simple mouse click to access suppressed details of a specific data group.

In this lesson, you'll dive into the details of the various report sections. We'll look at the Section Expert, which is your major tool for selecting options that control the appearance and the function of the various sections of a report. We'll also explore how to create a multicolumn report, most commonly used for printing mailing labels.

Today, you'll get hands-on experience formatting a report. We'll practice using absolute formatting, a feature that can dynamically adjust the appearance of your report based on the data it contains. We'll look at a number of formatting options that Crystal Reports offers to help you give your report just the look you want. By including Report Alerts in a report, for instance, you can guarantee that the person viewing the report will see and acknowledge anything that you consider to be of high importance. A report template is a great way to achieve a consistent appearance across a family of reports. We'll practice using both these options and more in this lesson.

Crystal Reports can do more than just display the data you select from your data source. It can also show correlations between related categories of data items using the Cross-Tab Object. You can show such correlations across the entire data set or within a selected group of data items. As usual, Crystal Reports provides considerable flexibility in how it presents the cross-tab data to users. In this lesson, you'll learn what the options are and how to use them.

You'll often need to create a report based on some, but not all, of the data in a database. For example, a sales manager may want to look only at the purchase records of her top five customers. Alternatively, she may want to view the performance of her bottom 10 salespeople. Crystal Reports makes it easy to produce such reports, as well as others that are selective about what they display. In this lesson, you'll create such targeted reports that make it easy for managers to make informed decisions.

You can make your reports dynamic, sensitive to what's happening at runtime, by using Crystal Reports formulas and control structures, and you'll find out how in this lesson. With formulas, you can operate on data and put the result into your report. You can save time and effort by including one or more of the predefined functions in your formulas. You can even create your own custom functions, save them, and use them both now and in the future. These facilities give you the flexibility to produce a sophisticated custom report written from scratch with a programming language such as Visual Basic or C#, but with much less time and effort.

Crystal Reports gives you the ability to embed one report inside another. The two reports can be related in some way, or they could be totally unrelated. As long as you have a reason for displaying both reports at once, you can do it, and you'll find out how in today's lesson. An alternative to embedding a subreport within a main report is embedding a hyperlink to the subreport, so we'll practice embedding subreports in this lesson, too.

In this lesson, we'll explore Crystal Reports' wide offering of charts and maps that can add visual dimension to the display of information in a report. For the visual learners in your target audience, charts and maps may be far better than columns of numbers at getting your point across. Today, you'll learn how to choose a chart type that best conveys the information you want to emphasize. You'll find out how to use color, font, scale, legends, and titles to help you highlight trends in the data or data points that fall outside the expected range.

After you've created a report, you need to distribute it. Crystal Reports gives you several convenient distribution options, and we'll explore them all in our final lesson. We'll talk about print and fax options, as well as exporting a report to any of a number of popular file formats, and transmitting it to the people who should read it. You'll learn how to post the report on your organization's intranet or the World Wide Web, then we'll discuss distributing reports via Crystal Enterprise's Crystal Reports Viewer.

Allen Taylor

Allen G. Taylor is a 30-year veteran of the computer industry and the author of 28 computer-related books, including "Crystal Reports 2008 For Dummies," "Database Development For Dummies" and "SQL For Dummies." He has been teaching computer course... Read more

Read Allen Taylor's Profile

Frequently Asked Questions

Once you've made the payment, we'll send you a confirmation email with a link to start your course. Feel free to get started whenever you're ready!

You'll have 3 months access to your course. In that time you are free to study at your own pace. The course duration is 24 hours.

Of course! We offer a 7-day money back guarantee. As long as you haven't completed the course, you can get a full refund within 7 days of enrolling.

What people are saying about our courses

I found the course to be extremely helpful. The material associated with the course will also serve as an excellent reference as I practice and become more efficient with Crystal Reports.

Verified Student

I really enjoyed this class. I like the instructor's comments about real life business cases. He made me a better report writer.

Verified Student

See More Reviews

The Learning Environment

From the moment that you enrol in the Crystal Reports 10 Fundamentals you will become an integral part of our learning community. You'll find yourself with the freedom to learn at a speed that suits you, on any device, from anywhere in the world. Achieving your career goals no longer has to mean compromising family and work commitments.