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Estimated Tasks

Highlight estimated tasks in your project timeline or Gantt chart

If you have estimated tasks in your Microsoft Project schedule, it's important for your team to clearly understand which tasks have committed dates and which are still subject to change. OnePager can help you highlight estimated tasks so that it's clear which part of your schedule is firm and which is still SWAG.

This OnePager Pro Gantt chart displays several tasks from Microsoft Project. Estimated tasks are automatically highlighted with a dashed red border:

Estimated tasks from Microsoft Project are highlighted with a dashed red border.

OnePager highlights these projected tasks automatically based on whether or not the task is marked as estimated in Microsoft Project:

This Microsoft Project schedule has some tasks with a projected start and finish date. For projected tasks, the ESTIMATED flag is set to 'Yes'

  1. To get started, go to your Microsoft Project Add-Ins tab and click the OnePager Pro button. If you don't already have OnePager Pro, you can download a free trial.

    OnePager Pro is a Gantt chart and timeline add-in for Microsoft Project.
  2. When the Start screen appears, click the NEW Project View button.
  3. Answer the simple questions in OnePager's import wizard to build your project Gantt chart. In this case, we'll include all tasks from Microsoft Project, but you can filter to a smaller set of tasks and milestones if you wish:

    Import tasks from Microsoft Project to build your timeline or Gantt chart.

  4. Click the Create New Project View button, and you'll get an initial project Gantt chart that looks something like this:

    Project Gantt Chart created in OnePager Pro

    This project timeline has grouped tasks into swimlanes based on the phase and has also assigned a unique color to each phase of the project. In addition, summary tasks appear larger than the detail tasks. OnePager gives you lots of different options for formating your Gantt chart.

  5. Now, it's time to highlight the tasks that are still esimated in Microsoft Project. To do this, go to Home > Project View Properties > Task Bars and click on the Manage Rules button in the Conditional Formatting section at the bottom.

    Pay attention to the fourth rule in the list, which says that when a task is marked as estimated in Microsoft Project, OnePager should change the border to a thick dashed line and color it red:

    When a task is estimated in Microsoft Project, format the bars in the Gantt chart to have a dashed red border.

    The first three rules are not relevant to highlighting estimated tasks; they control how colors and other formatting is assigned elsewhere in the chart.

  6. Click OK, and OnePager will look at each task to determine if it is marked as estimated in Microsoft Project. If it is, the red border will automatically appear:

    Project Gantt chart highlighting estimated tasks.

    As your project plan changes from week-to-week, you may find that some tasks that used to be estimated are now firmly scheduled. When that happens, simply refresh your OnePager report, and we'll automatically remove the red border to indicate that the tasks are no longer estimated.

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