How do you have project highlight a change

[John]

I have a Master project plan linked to a large number of projects. I want to
be able to see what changed from the last time I looked. I am using both 2003
and 2007 versions of MS project and would like to see that in each version,
Can anyone help ?

 

[John]

I have a Master project plan linked to a large number of projects. I want to
be able to see what changed from the last time I looked. I am using both 2003
and 2007 versions of MS project and would like to see that in each version,
Can anyone help ?

John
Project 2007 has change highlighting but previous versions do not. I
haven't tried using change highlighting in 2007 on a master project so I
can't offer any assistance there. Try it and see if it works - I kind of
doubt it.

To effect change highlighting in previous versions of Project, a VBA
macro will be required. It gets even more complicated with a master file
since the display of the master file is unique to the master but each
individual subprojects is not part of the master. The master only
provides pointers to the actual supbprojects.

John
Project MVP

 

[Jack Dahlgren]

Set a baseline or interim plan. Now when you change any existing tasks you
will have something to compare against.
There are a few ways you can make the changes more visible. One is to use a
calculated field which has a formula which compares the start or finish
against the previously saved start and finish (start1 and finish1 for
example) The other way is to use a custom field formula in a flag field
which compares the different start dates and can use a graphical inidicator
or can change bar formatting. In that case your formula would be
[Start1]=[Start] or something similar.

Here is an article about how conditional formatting would work:
http://masamiki.com/project/examples/Project_Grouping_And_Conditional_Formatting.html

 

[Martin Wilkinson]

There's a MS add-in which allows you to compare versions of a project. I've
used the 2000 version, but there seems to be a version for 2002 as well. Just
Google for "compare project versions".

The useability is a bit awkward, and I did have problems using it with
subprojects (see below), however it may help you. The problem as John
indicated seemed to be that the master project doesn't really "know" about
the subprojects unless they are all open and fully expanded.

Martin

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The schedule I was comparing had external links to a different Project file
(schedule), which was not open at the time the comparison was run. Links to
other schedules appear as “ghost†tasks.
The comparison crashed on the task immediately before the “ghost†task from
the other schedule.

If I also opened the schedule which was linked to, during the comparison, it
seems to run OK. It still seems a bit flaky, but what seemed to work
consistently was:

Open the “version 1†and “version 2†of the file to be compared
Expand all tasks in both versions 1 and 2
Open the other linked-to schedule and expand all tasks
Run the comparison.