How do I limit Outline Number to exclude level 1?

[MOE Ken]

Outline Number or WBS can have too many levels if all levels from the overall
project name on down are included in the Tasks. How can I limit which tasks
and/or task levels are assigned a number and which are not?

 

[Mike Glen]

Hi Ken,

Welcome to this Microsoft Project newsgroup

You can't, as that is how Project keeps track of the indenting you have
imposed.

FAQs, companion products and other useful Project information can be seen at
this web address: <http://www.mvps.org/project/>

Hope this helps - please let us know how you get on )

Mike Glen
MS Project MVP

 

[Steve House [MVP]]

Project allows 65535 levels of outline indentation. How can you have too
many levels? Most projects don't even have that many tasks, much less
indentation levels. Or are you still using P98 where it was limited to 9
levels?

 

[MOE Ken]

Steve,

My boss wants to show less levels, as he thinks they take up too much room
and/or don't serve a purpose. Why can't Project keep track of indentation
another way but allow user-input to how the numbers are displayed?

Ken

 

[Mike Glen]

Hi Ken,

Well, you can remove the indenting for all of them through
Tools/Options/View tab at the bottom left, additionally, you could show the
outline number instead. Or you could insert a Column for Outline Level or
Outling Number.


Mike Glen
Project MVP

 

[Steve House [MVP]]

If your boss doesn't think the levels serve any purpose in the Gantt chart
table (and most of the time, frankly, I'd agree with him that displaying
them just clutters up the chart) then why not just turn them off so the
numbers aren't displayed (Tools, Options, View)? As far as accepting user
input as to how the numbers are displayed, you can do exactly that by
defining a custom WBS code (Project, WBS, DefineCode). But you're asking a
bit much of any software when you say you want to see *this* set of tasks
with outline codes but *that* set of otherwise identical tasks in the same
project and at the same level without them, all on the same screen.
Remember Project is structurally at its core a database and the tasks are
records in some of its tables. A database view of a data set is usually
global, with specific fields either displayed or not as you wish but ther
same display option uniformly for all records. You couldn't do a query in
Access or SQL that says "output the last name field for all records from
California but omit the column for all records from New York" without
jumping through some very kludgy hoops. No, populated with data or not, the
columns to be output would be the same for all records in the result set.
--
Steve House [MVP]
MS Project Trainer/Consultant
Visit http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm for the FAQs

 

[MOE Ken]

Thanks, Steve. I understand re. databases and how difficult it would be to
allow the WBS column to be user-input. Instead, I have used a Text column
and input my own reference numbers.

 

[Steve House [MVP]]

Didn't quite say you couldn't input your own numbers - that's what the WBS
code in the Project, WBS is for. You can name level 1 task AAA, or 100, or
antythhing you choose. But what you can't do is display the WBS for some of
the tasks in a view without displaying it for others. The display of a
given field, ie, column in a table, is either on for all of the tasks in a
view or for none of them. That means no matter what code you use, all the
tasks in the view will show their codes if any of them do. You still can't
have some of them at outline level 1 displaying your custom WBS code and
others at level 1 not showing it.
--
Steve House [MVP]
MS Project Trainer/Consultant
Visit http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm for the FAQs