Share via

What's New in the Project Guide

  • Article

The Project Guide in Microsoft® Office Project 2003 has several new and improved features. The Project Guide content now includes a printing wizard, the ability to show issues and risks, and extended features in Microsoft Office Project Professional 2003. The Project Guide offers improved programmability and improved menus for "Next Steps & Related Activities."

New features are discussed in the following categories:

  • New Project Guide Content
  • Programmability
  • Style

New Project Guide Content

Printing Wizard

A new Project Guide printing wizard helps users print Project views. This wizard organizes most of Project's print-related features into one place, and is accessible from the Print current view as a report task in the Report goal area. The wizard has the following features:

  • The print wizard is nontraditional in that you don't need to proceed to the final step of the wizard before an action occurs. Instead, every pane has Print and Print Preview buttons. As you make changes with the help of the Project Guide, you can see the effect of the changes by pressing either button. You can choose to leave the wizard at any time by using the Done link in the side pane footer. The wizard groups the most-used printing features for each view at the start.
  • If you access the printing wizard while a nonprintable view is active, such as any Form view, Project displays an error side pane from which you can choose to apply a printable view and proceed with the wizard.
  • Wizard content varies based on the screen type of the active view. For example, the Gantt Chart and Calendar views show different wizard content.
  • You can easily make a one-page printout for the screen types that can be printed to one page. When you click Print or Print Preview, the wizard automatically sets "Fit to 1 x 1" and "Fit timescale to end of page" for the current view. If you like the one-page printout, you're done; otherwise, you can go to the next step in the wizard.

Risks and Issues Content

In Microsoft Project 2002, the Project Guide provided the ability to load the Issues and Documents pages from Project Web Access. In Project 2003, you can also load the Risks page in the Project Guide.

Differentiation between Project Standard and Project Professional

Project Standard 2003 does not integrate with Project Server; therefore, the Project Guide content in Project Standard is a subset of the content in Project Professional. Additional differences follow:

  • Project Professional contains 11 more GoalAreaTasks than Project Standard (Project Professional uses a larger gbui.xml ProjectGuideContent file).
  • Project Professional has a Define the project wizard that is accessible from the Tasks goal area. In Project Standard, the activity is reduced to a single side pane titled Set a date to schedule from.
  • Project Standard has the Add columns of custom information GoalAreaTask, accessible from the Tasks and Resources goal areas. However, compared to Project Professional, it provides the user with a shorter list of columns that can be added to a view.

Programmability

Relative Path Support

Similar to the gbui:// protocol introduced with the Project Guide in Microsoft Project 2002, Project 2003 includes two new pluggable protocols for Microsoft Internet Explorer: pgmainpage:// and pgcontent://. Custom Project Guides that use these new protocols to define paths to custom content can now be moved easily from one location to another without having to modify every custom Project Guide file to point to the new location. All you need to update is the ProjectGuideContent and/or the ProjectGuideFunctionalLayoutPage properties for a project, using the custom Project Guide.

Whenever the Project Guide encounters a pgmainpage:// or pgcontent:// protocol in a custom Project Guide, it internally constructs the appropriate source URL using the following steps:

  • A project uses a custom Project Guide with content defined by ProjectGuideContent = "c:\CustomPG\myGBUI.xml".
  • The myGBUI.xml file contains a <GoalArea> tag with the tag <URL> pgcontent://ga1_main.htm </URL>.
  • When you click the goal area's button in the Project Guide toolbar, Project replaces pgcontent:// with "c:\CustomPG\" and constructs the side pane's URL as "c:\CustomPG\ga1_main.htm".

If you choose to share your custom Project Guide, you can move the files to a shared network folder. Unlike Microsoft Project 2002, you do not have to modify any paths in the custom Project Guide source files to load the custom Project Guide into Project 2003. Instead, you simply modify ProjectGuideContent of the project where the custom Project Guide is to be used. When the Project Guide encounters the pgcontent:// protocol in a custom Project Guide file, it constructs an appropriate URL using the new shared network folder as a base.

Style

Next Steps & Related Activities

In Microsoft Project 2002, the menu Next Steps & Related Activities is accessible from the Project Guide toolbar. Clicking on this Project Guide toolbar button shows a drop-down list of all tasks in the Project Guide. For the current task, Microsoft Project 2002 displays any related tasks or activities as indented items. This list is difficult to navigate for a Project Guide with multiple goal areas and multiple tasks within each goal area.

In Project 2003, the menu Next Steps & Related Activities is composed of multiple, smaller menus. Each goal area has an associated drop-down menu on the Project Guide toolbar. Clicking that drop-down menu shows only the tasks for that specific goal area, and the related tasks and activities. This makes the list of tasks easier to navigate. For example, the following figure shows the drop-down tasks menu of the Resources goal area in the Project Guide toolbar.

Drop-down Project Guide menu of tasks for the Resources goal area in Project 2003

Drop-down Project Guide menu of tasks for the Resources goal area in Project 2003

Microsoft Office System UI Updates and Windows Theme Support

The user interface in all Microsoft Office System applications uses higher color graphics and visual effects, compared to earlier versions. The Project Guide in Project 2003 includes the same visual updates; for example, the task Organize tasks into phases in the Tasks goal area uses the new gradient background images.

The new Project Guide is also able to respond to changes in the Microsoft Windows theme. For example, if you apply a Windows theme with a new color scheme, the Project Guide updates its side pane headers to use the theme color.