For the 70-632 certification exam the difference between summary tasks and lowest-level tasks might be the most important task organization fact to remember. But learning the tricks of the task arrangement trade can help you pass the test -- and save you tons of Microsoft Project wrangling over the years.

Tasks without lower-level tasks hold the building blocks of your Project data: duration, work hours, resource assignments, and costs. They are the work packages that make up your project. Summary tasks, on the other hand, are tasks that summarize lower-level tasks. Any task with at least one lower-level task is a summary task in Project. Although you might decide to assign resources to summary tasks once in a blue moon, summary tasks are typically reserved for rolling up values from their subtasks.

The project summary task is another feature likely to pop up on the exam. When you turn on the Show Project Summary Task checkbox (on the View tab of the Options dialog box), Project includes row zero (0) in the task table. This project summary task rolls up the values for your entire project -- a great way to see the 50,000-foot view of your project.

The other organizational feature that you might see on the exam is the Autolink Inserted Or Moved Tasks checkbox (on the Schedule tab in the Options dialog box), which is turned on out of the box. With this setting, Project automatically modifies task links as you insert, move, or delete tasks, which is handy when you’re constructing your schedule. Once task dependencies are in place, turn off the checkbox, so you have total say over the dependencies in your file. (See "Certification Inside: Configuring Tools and Options" for more information.)

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