The Most You Can Get Out of MS Project 2013

Being involved in a high stakes business requires you to get the best platforms that are out there. Project Standard 2013 or Project Pro of the same year are good examples here. Hence, if you’re thinking about Project Std 2013, you may notice that its most stand-out feature is that it has a new interface.

You probably already know that MS Project also has a Microsoft Office-like look to it so familiarity using the platform may not be something you need to worry yourself so much about. With Project 2013, you can author some very high resolution, colorful and professional looking presentations while working within the app itself. You need not export your data to another platform. You can input charts, photographs, links and you can even do animation. This gives your presentation more impact to all who have a stake at your venture.

You will also benefit from the new set of reports that are pre-installed. These give you much more versatile formatting capacities and better graphics. Data walls are a thing of the past and what you get are crisp charts and pictures that can help you deliver a much more concise overview of your topics.

An additional plus you will get from Project 2013 is the Burndown reports. These illustrate work that is planned, completed and still to be done. These appear as lines within a graph. What this does is give you and your team a clear picture of whether you are behind or ahead of schedule.

Possibly the best thing you can get out of Project2013 Standard is that you can communicate with your team. You can get real time updates and query on the spot and you may even engage in strategizing and discussions all within the Project platform itself.  All you have to do is initiate an IM session by hovering over a name. You can also do a video chat. This feature can only be used with Lync 2010.

Finally, the Gantt chart can be simplified by highlighting your link chain. This is also called the task path for any current project. By clicking on a task, all of its previous tasks appear as a single color and its succeeding tasks are displayed in a different color. This ensures a very clean and clear interface when using the platform.