Cool New Project 2010 Feature: Inactive Tasks
Like many Project Managers out there we often have tasks or sections of our project schedules that we want to hide or ‘remove’ for what-if scenarios or to show our executive teams different scenarios. Well the new Inactive Task feature allows you to do this very easily and the best part is that it carries throughout the project schedule. Meaning if you have tasks (with or without actual hours) you can inactivate those tasks and see the result on the entire project (in the Gantt Chart, Resource Usage, and at the Project Summary level).
Possible Uses:
1) Scenario-based Planning (Phase 1-3 and an optional Phase 4 could all be contained in one project schedule and with Inactive tasks you can easily see the project totals for Phase 1-3 and/or Phase 1-4. No need to create two separate project schedule (files) with this information.
2) Canceling/Removing work that was scheduled and now it is out of scope (You will also see that the Summary task or task is Inactive.
You will see that the inactive tasks retain their task information (although inactive) including all estimates, task dependencies, and resource assignments. Note that the dates for the inactive tasks are in grey.
So how do you think that it will handle Baseline information? Inactive tasks will not change the baseline/variance information that was saved. This is good.
Hints:
· Add in the Active Column
· Right-click on task (or summary task) and select Inactive
This will help everyone out there. Note this feature is only available in Project Professional 2010.
