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The best view to see slippage between baseline vs. actual work is the Detail Gantt view.

It took some time before I got my head around how to tweak visual reports. For Excel visual reports, the secret is the two worksheets.

The Madison MPUG chapter has introduced the concept of a "speed demo," a five- to 10-minute sharing of a process or tool that we think other members might find beneficial to use in their organizations.

When you've checked out a project in Project Server 2010, nobody else can check it out at the same time or make changes.

As you develop your communication plan, the golden rule is to give the audience what it wants. If that means you have to prepare a PowerPoint presentation for the steering committee, an Excel spreadsheet for the accounting department, and a Word document for project teams, so be it.

Only when you've clearly articulated pragmatic goals to create a delivery culture and you begin to show credibility in meeting your schedule will the executive start to move forward in his or her commitment.

The 2007 equivalent to 2010's Task Inspector is the Task Driver.

The work breakdown structure is especially useful in situations where deliverables are less tangible or those responsible for getting a successful outcome don't think like project managers.

The Fixed Unit task, Project's default, usually isn't used as much as fixed work and fixed duration tasks.

The project execution itself (as performed on the project) is the reality; the project schedule is the model used to manage that reality.

In desktop-Project land, a master project is a more robust way to manage several projects. You create a Project file to act as the master and insert each individual Project file into the master file.

Project managers need to treat the schedule as a living body to be constantly updated with the latest available data.

You can have both Project 2007 and Project 2010 installed on your workstation, however, you can't have both versions open at the same time.

When schedulers reuse the same task names within a project schedule and resources are over-allocated, it's hard to determine which of the same named tasks are affected.

These days, most if not all project management experts have a Facebook page. This means that you can create professional contacts quickly to get questions answered or to jump to a suggested site.