Category Archives: Best Practices

Importing Fonts into OnePager

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When it comes to timelines and Gantt charts, appearance matters. The whole point of creating a chart in OnePager is for it to be a visual project report. In addition to colors and shapes, the font you use can make a big impact on the overall look and feel of your chart.

The first step in adding a new font to OnePager is to add it to Windows. Microsoft has put together detailed step-by-step instructions on how to do this:

Add a font – Microsoft Support

After you have added the font(s) to Windows, launch OnePager and go to Chart Properties. Open any form that has a font control. In this example, we will change the Task Label to a custom font called “KG Chasing Cars.” Once you have selected the font, click OK and OK.

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Resource Usage Across Multiple Microsoft Project Files

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Hello again to all my fellow OnePager users! I have a question for you today. Have you ever wondered what an easy way would be for you to track resource usage across multiple schedules? If you have ever asked yourself that, you are in for a treat. If you have not, you are still in for a treat. This article will discuss using Conditional Formatting Rules (CFR) to display available resource hours within your OnePager chart.

The first thing to do here is to ensure you have a schedule with hours entered into the Work field. This is the field we will use in the OnePager chart to create rules and track resource hours.

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Weekend Work on an Hourly Scale

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Most schedules show work that takes place during the work week, but in this article, we will explore creating a Gantt chart that displays, on an hourly scale, work done over the weekend.

Below is a schedule with tasks for Saturday and Sunday between 8:00 am and 3:00 pm.

The next step is to launch OnePager and create the chart by going to Add-ins > OnePager > New. After clicking New, you should see the “OnePager choices” window; we will select an out-of-the-box template designed for an hourly view. To do this, click Change… and then Browse, which will bring you to the template folder. Select the “Hourly View” template, and then finish creating your chart.

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Milestone Types using Project Online

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If your project has lots of different milestones, you may benefit from defining a Milestone Type in Project Online so that different families of milestones are easier to distinguish.

Examples of different milestone types include major, minor, payment, and review, to name a few. In this article, we will share how to create enterprise custom fields and lookup tables in Project Online to catalog our milestone types and how to use them in your OnePager chart. 

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Percent Complete Color Coding

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For anyone who has created a schedule, one of the essential things to know is percent complete. Users of OnePager know we already offer ways to show percent complete via a yellow bar, text, or a checkmark. However, we will dive into another method: color coding different tasks based on a percent complete range.

We will first want to determine what percent complete ranges we want to create rules for and what color will represent them. In this example, I will be using the following ranges.

0% – 25% | 26% – 50% | 51% – 75% | 76% – 100%

Once you have decided on your rules, create a chart from your source file.
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Multiple Values in Conditional Formatting

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In my view, among the many great features of OnePager, none beat Conditional Formatting. With Conditional Formatting, you can create rules to change the color, shape, fill, and other properties of tasks and milestones based on specific rules that you set. However, what happens when you have multiple values to which you need the same rule to apply? You could create a bunch of separate rules, but that’s a lot of work. In this article, we will go over how you can create a conditional formatting rule that tests for multiple conditions at once.

Imagine with me, if you will, that you have a schedule with individual resources assigned to different tasks. Each resource is part of a specific team in your organization, and you would like to be able to color tasks based on the team that the people belong to, not based on their individual names.

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Setting a Task’s Finish Time in Excel

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When creating a schedule in an Excel spreadsheet, you will have a Start date and Finish date. But there is also a time associated with those dates, and if you don’t set it, your tasks may appear to finish earlier than expected. In the example below, both tasks finish on the seventh day, but the blue task finishes at 12:00 a.m. and the red task finishes at 11:59 p.m., almost a full day later. Paying attention to the times associated with your dates in Excel will help you ensure that a task is scheduled correctly.

This blog will go over an addition to make to the formula in your Excel spreadsheet to change the time of your task Finish date.

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Timeline without Dates

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With a Gantt chart, you can display Start/Finish dates that show exactly when a task starts and finishes. However, in this blog, we will be creating a dateless chart to show a graphical representation of your schedule without any specific dates displayed. 

We will start at the top of the chart with the Time Axis representing different tic units. In the example, we utilize the Month and Week units of the Time Axis.

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Identifying Late and Very Late Tasks with Finish Variance

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In Microsoft Project, a field called Finish Variance shows how many days there are between the Finish and the Baseline Finish fields. Using this data can be helpful when trying to determine if your tasks are finishing on, before, or after their planned finish dates.

If you want to use the Finish Variance field in your OnePager Conditional Formatting Rules to show visually if your tasks are late, you’ll run into an issue: Microsoft Project treats Finish Variance as a string field instead of a number.

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Mavericks

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Did you know that you can “maverick” tasks or milestone shapes in OnePager?

This is the term we use when one or many shapes in the body of the chart have had any of their properties manually modified.

If you happen to modify one or many shapes using the capabilities in the Home tab on the Ribbon (Font, Format, Alignment, Position), or right-clicked on a shape and chosen Format to reveal the Change Task/Milestone Properties to make a change there… you have “mavericked” your shapes.

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