Rule of Thumb

Now that you know how get resource workload and costs out of Microsoft Project, you can go further and add some custom groupings for further slicing and dicing.

In my case, we have two distinct phases on projects:

• feasibility study / project definition phase and
• implementation phase.

We have to prepare and report separate budgets for each phase.

Next, there are different type of costs on the project. They can be booked either as operative expense (OPEX) or capital expense (CAPEX).

These and all other attributes can be configured in Microsoft Project and exported to a nice Microsoft Excel pivot table.

Here’s how. Microsoft Project has 8 groups of customizable fields:

• Cost
• Date
• Duration
• Finish
• Flag
• Number
• Start
• Text

You can use them for whatever you want. By default they’re just numbered, like Text1, Text2, etc. but you can rename them, assign value lists, define default values, define behaviors of summary tasks, define graphical display of the values, etc.

We’ll use Text1 field and turn it into Cost Type with predefined value list:

1. Switch to Gantt View, then select Cost Table from View, Table.
2. Bring up Customize Fields dialog box by right clicking on any of column headings and selecting Customize Fields or through menus Tools, Customize and Fields.
3. Choose Text in the Type dropdown box.
4. Select Text1.
5. Click Rename, type in Cost Type and confirm it by clicking OK.
6. Now click Value List and type OPEX into the Value column of the first row and CAPEX into the second row.
7. You can define default value by checking Use a value from the list as the default entry for the field, selecting default value and clicking Set Default.
8. Confirm the settings for Value List with OK.
9. Click OK to finish field customization.

Field is now defined. You still need to add it to the Cost table.

1. Right click on a column heading, before which you want to add Cost Type field.
2. Select Insert Column.
3. Find Text1 (Cost Type), define optional attributes and confirm with OK.

You can now define each task’s cost type with drop down box in the task sheet or in Task Information dialog box on Custom Fields page.

Getting this new information into Microsoft Excel pivot table will be a subject of the next post.