Line spacing issue 1

[vivekm]

Hi,

I have MS Project 2003. For some reason, the width of each line is double-width rather than single width. This is shown in the attached document.

Someone else has MS Project 2000 and they have copied and pasted the plan with single-width. When I open the plan that they save, it comes up as double-width which leads me to suspect that this is an issue with my settings.

Any help appreciated

 

[PDQBach]

This will adjust the height of all tasks:

1. Click once in the square grey box above the sequence number and to the immediate left of "Task Name". This will select all tasks.

2. In the column with the sequence numbers, put your cursor on the dividor line between two tasks. The cursor will change to a horizontal bar with an up- and a down-arrow. Press and hold the left-mouse button and drag the line to the height you want.

This will adjust the height of a single task:

1. Do not do step 1 above
2. Do only step 2 above.

Note that task heights seem to be "kinda" preset. You cannot adjust them as finely as you can an Excel height.

Note, too, that you cannot shrink the height of task to make it smaller than the height of the Gantt bars for that task. (If you don't understand what I'm talking about here, don't worry ... it's not that important and only has an impact if you are displaying the Gantt bars on multiple rows. <-- note "rows" means Gantt bar rows; it does NOT mean task 'rows'.

 

[vivekm]

Thanks for that detailed explanation and I have tried this already - so have a couple of other PMs but to no avail.

It sounds like your latter comment seems to be the issue. It may be some settings in the view that I have - either in the left pane or the Gantt Chart pane. Could you elaborate where I can tweak the seetings for this view?

 

[PDQBach]

View > Gantt
Format > Bar Styles

In the "Bar Styles" dialog, look for the column labelled "row". Normally, these are all 1 but you can adjust them to be anything from 1 to 4.

 

[vivekm]

They are all already set to 1. I have tried to update all of them manually to 1 (just in case) and still no joy.

 

[PDQBach]

Please email the file to me pdqbach4100 at my hotmail account. If you need to sanitize the file, display the column UniqueID and then copy and paste this into the Name field ... repeat the same process on the Resource view. Also check the Text fields and clear those out, too.

 

[PDQBach]

I've had a look at the schedule and was able to give vivekm an answer to his problem.

It is possible to configure the Gantt portion of the display so that it shows significant amounts of information.

View > Gantt
Format > Bar styles...

In the Bar Styles dialog, you can click on each of the items in the top half of the display and additional information for it appears in the bottom half on two tabs. One tab ("Bars") lets you control the display of the Gantt bars (colours, shapes, etc.).

The other tab ("Text") lets you control the display of textual information along with the bar. These text fields are displayed above, below, to the left, to the right and within the bar.

And now you have probably guessed what was happening: the previous user of the plan had set it up so that information was appearing above, below, to the left and to the right of the bar. The amount of "real estate" needed to display all this information controls the size of the row being displayed.

But it was just a little trickier than that. The previous user had set it up to display information for Tasks above and below the bar but even when I cleared that out, it didn't fully solve the spacing problem.

In addition to being able to give a default set of display settings for bars, it is also possible to custom tailor the display on selected tasks. The previous user had also gone to one of the milestone tasks, clicked the RightMouseButton on the diamond in the Gantt display, selected "Bar Styles" from the popup properties menu and then set that one milestone to have text above and below.

Once I cleared that out, the display reverted to normal.

The Format > Bar styles dialog lets you display a single piece of information in each of the 5 locations (above, below, left, right, inside) related to the bars. Let's suppose that vivekm still wants to display all that information and also wants to display it on a single line of text to the right of the Gantt bar.

Here's a simple example that shows you how to do it:

View > Gantt
Insert the Text1 column
RightMouseButton on the column header
Click on Customize Fields...

In the Customize Fields dialog popup, click on the button labelled "Formula..."

In the "Formula" dialog popup, enter an appropriate formula. This formula will display the Start and Finish for the task:

"S:" & [Start] & " -- F:" & Year([Finish]) & "/" & Month([Finish]) & "/" & Day([Finish])

You'll notice that I've chosen two different approaches for the two different dates. If you try this you will see the reason why.

Click on OK to accept the formula; click on OK to apply the customization.

The Gantt display won't have changed.

Click on Format > Bar styles... to display the Bar Styles popup dialog
Click once on the row labelled "Task"
Click once on the tab labelled "Text"
in the box labelled "Right", choose the Text1 field.
Click on OK to apply the Bar Styles.

You should now see the two fields (Start and Finish) being displayed.