VIDEO: Microsoft Project 2021 Overview And Features Walkthrough

if you're looking for a way to organize tasks and projects you may have heard of microsoft project this is just one of many project management software products so be sure to do your homework before buying hey project managers i'm meredith and in this video we're offering an overview of microsoft project but if you want to dive deeper check out our website at project management.com for in-depth articles helpful tips and info about project management software just go click the link in the description below to learn more if you are a long time microsoft user you might remember microsoft project as an on-premises application that kind of resembled excel this program is marketed as more of an enterprise solution with a price tag to match now fast forward to the present microsoft project has not gone anywhere but it got a major update late in 2019 the app is now called microsoft project for the web which is a sas tool that you can access at an extra cost as part of the office 365 suite of apps microsoft also lowered the cost making it more accessible to companies of all sizes microsoft project currently comes in three paid plans and you can test it out through a free trial now one quick note before we actually look at the tool if you go on the microsoft website you'll see that you can still buy an on-premises version of microsoft project called project standard 2019 this is the version you might have used before microsoft released the cloud-based version in late 2019 but microsoft doesn't update it anymore okay on to the overview opening microsoft project you'll see that the system displays your current projects in a list once you create a new project you can start adding tasks in the grid view which resembles a spreadsheet you can name tasks arrange their order assign them to teammates and give them deadlines projects also supports task dependencies and subtasks which are helpful for even more complex projects you can click on a task to see more details add a note or file to a bucket don't worry i'll explain buckets in just a moment when we look at the board view but the last thing i'm going to mention to you about tasks is that you have a lot of freedom when it comes to adding information about them microsoft project lets you add additional columns to display different kinds of information so you can include things like your bucket dependence effort and effort remaining now let's take a look at some of the different views in microsoft project the board view takes a kanban based approach to visualizing project tasks this is where buckets come into play which are the different lanes that you can use to organize tasks the board view is an easy way to quickly see your tasks by stage of completion and you can even drag and drop tasks around for easy reorganizing if you want a simplified board view that only shows tasks grouped by not started in progress or completed you can also do that by changing the group preference in the top right corner the timeline view is your basic gantt chart if you're used to working in the legacy version of microsoft project then this might be your preferred way to view tasks the timeline view represents your tasks of squares and rectangles plotted on a calendar so just like the boards view you can also drag and drop tasks in the timeline view and just mousing over the ends of the rectangles gives you the option to either stretch them out or make them shorter depending on the plan you go with you can also access features like reporting project milestones timesheet submission resource management and portfolio management and of course since microsoft project is part of the office 365 suite it integrates seamlessly with other microsoft apps like teams power bi onenote and many others now speaking of other apps you might want to look around at some other project management software tools in addition to microsoft project being that microsoft project is a straightforward and affordable solution for businesses of all sizes we'd recommend also checking out monday.com asana and reich hopefully you now have a better idea of whether or not microsoft project is right for your project management needs but if you're still not sure click the link in the description below for more tips on project management software tools please be sure to subscribe turn on notifications for more project management software videos and we'll see you next time bye

This transcript was generated automatically from the video's captions and may contain errors.