Subtitles of the Movie

Project provides us a quick way as project managers to get a quick snapshot of the activity that's going on in our project and you can do that with the project information dialog box and one of the things that, that project information dialog box is useful for is getting a quick look at the project duration. So once I've defined my project a little bit here, I might want to take stock of how long this thing is going to take here. Well, once again I can go to the project information dialog box, open up project or from the project menu click on project information. It brings up this right here, now this will look different depending on whether you're using the professional version or the stand alone version. If you're using the professional version you'll see some enterprise fields, some custom fields that will be there in case there's a connection to the project server. But really dealing with just the start date and finishing date here we want to see the overall project duration and also we can't edit this, remember because we define the project start date so the finish date is defined by how long our tasks are taking here. So another thing to look here is the statistics button and that opens up this project statistics dialog box so we have the start date and the finish date and the duration down here, so the current duration, it's 21 days with a question mark. Well why is it question mark? It's because this summary task right now is really defining the entire duration of our project and one of the constituent tasks in that summary task is this one, meet with distributors. So because that has a default value that was taken we haven't explicitly defined it until we do it'll have a question mark and the summary task will also have a question mark. So if I define it specifically with a duration of one day notice that, that goes away. The question mark goes away, the question mark goes away here so once you've made your corrections here you can go back up to the project information dialog box and see if that's made any changes but in this case it doesn't make any changes and the reason is because I still have tasks that aren't specifically defined, they've just taken the default values. So this raise in capital could take three months and that of course would change the duration of the project so until we specifically say, until we erase these question marks by entering in a specific duration for the task we'll always have this little question mark next to the duration. But once we address that, that should go away. Now we've showed you how to look at the project information dialog box to get a number, but if we want to get a more of a visual representation of how long the project is going to take. We can also do that by one, we can give some more real estate to our Gant chart part of the Gant chart rather then the task list here. We could just adjust some of the sliders here and try to get an overall view of when the thing is going to start and in we can make the project guide go away just like that. We can also right click on the timeline here and click on the zoom option and we can zoom out for the entire project and click on ok. So that should give us a view of the entire project once again to change the level of zoom for our Gant charts, so of course this is going to sprawl over the course of several months, it would just condense everything so that we could see the entire project in one view.