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Creating custom views in MS Project

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Swamy, a Developer on my team, posted this information on the TFS forum and I wanted to share it with all of you since the question on how to customize the MS Project view comes up every once in a while.

 

With the MS Project integration in TFS V1, you get 2 TFS related views out of the box:

 

  1. Team System Gantt :The list of columns displayed in this view is fixed/not configurable.
  2. Team System Task Sheet: The list of columns displayed in this view is based on the fields that are mapped using TFSFieldMapping.exe

 

But there may be scenarios where you want to create custom views. For ex. if new fields were added to the work items or if you want to choose which fields to display or just the order in which the fields are displayed.

 

Following are some simple steps for creating custom views and exporting them to other users

  1. From Project, connect to a Team Project to create the TFS specific tables and views
  2. Select the menu item ViewàTable: <Xyz>àMore Tables
  3. Create a new table (say "My TFS Table") to display the columns you need. Alternately, you can copy one of the existing tables and edit it.
  4. Select the menu item View-->More views and create a new view that uses table defined in step2.
  5. Select “Show in Menu” option, in order to add these views under “View” menu
  6. In order to use this view in more than Project file, use Tools-->Organizer (View Tab) and copy the new view and table to Global.MPT or to the required projects
  7. One of the following options can be used for exporting these custom tables, views to other machines
    • Option1: Other users can copy Global.MPT from the source machine where the table/view was created and paste it to %Program Files%\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\1033 on their machine     
    • Option2: You can save the custom table/view to a sample mpp or MPT (Use File->Save As-->Save as type) file. Other users can open this mpp or mpt file on their machine and use Tools-->Organizer to copy this view to their Global.MPT
  8. Once these custom views are defined you can pick any of these views under the “View” menu

We hope this information was useful to you!