Introduction to Customizing the Project Guide

The Project Guide is an HTML interface for Microsoft® Office Project 2003 that lets you think about your projects in real terms. That means you can easily check to see when the "plumber will be done" rather than checking a "finish date along a task path." That's the real benefit of the Project Guide; it lets you operate in everyday language without needing to translate your business practices into abstract terms.

Project management software often makes users think about business in abstract terms of tasks, resources, and assignments. That's a good general practice because it can be adapted to serve any business model. However, it can bring up some difficulties for users who then have to translate their own business's language into those abstract terms.

For example, can your users easily tell what they can do with this interface?

Project user interface example 1

Or with this one?

Project user interface example 2

These views are quickly recognizable only if users are familiar with Project. The Project Guide gives Project its first goal-oriented interface. It puts Project contents into a familiar HTML framework, accompanied by side panes that manipulate Project through its object model. Organizations can use these side panes to present what's happening in Project in terms of their own business methods. By using the Project Guide, the person customizing the Project Guide is the only one who needs to think of the business in both the organization's terms and in the software's language. Everyone else in the organization gets the benefits of Project without needing to learn its terminology.

This section of "Project Guide 101" shows you how to customize the Project Guide, walks you through common steps in the customization process, explains the basic structure of the Project Guide, and helps you create an entire custom Project Guide. The discussion assumes you are generally familiar with Extensible Markup Language (XML), Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), dynamic HTML (DHTML), scripting, and the Project object model.

For an introduction to the toolbar, side panes, and main page of the Project Guide, see Elements of the Project Guide.

The first and most important step in creating a custom Project Guide is planning the design. See Project Guide Design.