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After you've created side panes, you can create the main page for your Project Guide. The main page provides an HTML layout for the Project Guide contents, and it often takes on extra jobs because it is a good place to put commonly used support code for the side panes.

You can make any HTML page into a main page in three steps:

  1. Make the page either local (installed on the user's computer) or trusted in Microsoft® Internet Explorer. The Project Guide doesn't have its own trusted sites list, so it trusts anything that Internet Explorer trusts.
  2. Mark the page for Microsoft Office Project as a main page by adding the comment "<!-- ProjectGuideMainpage -->" at the start of the file.
  3. On the Microsoft Office Project Tools menu, click Options, and then click the Interface tab. In Project Guide Functionality and Layout Page, click Use a custom page. A URL text box appears with the current path to the main page; replace the text with the path to your main page, and then click OK.

In addition to providing page layout, the default main page can play three roles:

  • Catch events from Project and handle the events. This includes catching view change events and using them to enforce relevant views. For more information about event details, see Event Handling. For more information about relevant views, see The Project Guide Content Schema.
  • Persist the Project Guide state using the Project.ProjectGuideSaveBuffer property. For more information, see Persisting the Project Guide's State.
  • Translate the content schema into a Project Guide structure and manage navigation through that structure. For more information, see The Project Guide Content Schema.

The main page does these three jobs because they are common operations. Take a look at a main page file in the download for sample implementations, for example, prodlaunch_mainpage.htm of the Product Launch sample in the Interviewer Wizard Project Guides.

Note  A main page can have any *.htm name if it satisfies the main page requirements, because it is designated as a main page in the Options dialog box. A custom Project Guide can also use the default main page. For example, the Critical Path Project Guide uses the default main page but with a different Project Guide schema.