Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Tom Stevenson and welcome to Microsoft Project Made Easy. Today, we are going to be looking at creating a master project file. And what exactly is a master project file? Well, in Microsoft Project, you can create a file or a project file that houses your other projects. So it's like the name says, it's a master project file. Like a lot of us, you may have three, four, five different projects on the go at one time. And that's great, you've got them in each individual file, but you want to know overall what things are coming up. You want to have a single view of it. You can get more advanced, as I'll do in another video, where you can share resources across the files as well. But for today, we're just going to look at creating a master project file that we can view our projects in. We can make adjustments to our projects, and it actually will adjust the individual files at the same time. So they're linked together. So if you make a change in the master project file, it'll make a link in your existing files, unless you've told project you want it only to be read-only in the master project file. So you can just look at it and contextualize what exactly is coming up and what the relationships may be between the different projects, etc. It's not a complicated thing to do. You just have to be a little bit careful on how you're managing it depending on your organizational requirements. If you're sharing this across teams and things of that nature, you may find something like Project Online might be a little bit more intuitive and easy to use in that respect. But for sure, like a lot of small to medium enterprises, this might be a really good tool for you to use in managing your projects as you go. So I've created this relatively simple file, and I called it Project Anywhere One, just so that we can see in the different areas. When we put in the subprojects into a master project files, we will be able to identify with them. You'll see what I mean as we go along. But you could create this and follow along if you want something similar to this. It's just to get the idea. There's nothing too complicated about creating it. So I've got these activities, and if I pull this to the side, you'll likely see... Oh, no, I don't have that on this. I guess I haven't got my resources here in this particular case. I thought I'd created them, but that's okay. We'll do that right now. So I'm just going to go to the resource sheet, create a few resources here. Oh, they are created. I just haven't applied them yet. I thought I did that. Plumbing sub, carpenter, HVAC sub, PM, site super, even better. So you could, again, create a few resources in your project file. I made a couple of them cost, and three of them work. And I threw in a few hourly dollar figures, so you'll see them. And so once that's created, I'm going to go back to my Gantt chart. I'll quickly apply the resources. I'll go assign resources, and maybe I'll put the PM. I'll assign to the whole project just to split it up. Maybe I'll put the carpenter to the first activity, task one. I'll put the HVAC sub to task two. Maybe I'll put $10,000 to that one, and we'll go plumbing sub over here. We'll assign to task three. Maybe we'll put $20,000. And to task four, let's put the site super assigned. So we've assigned a bunch of different resources here, and I'm just going to squeeze up my chart so you can see it a little bit. Double-click on it just so that you can see everything to the right. Usually I just bring it down to around 50%. Double-clicking on the time scale does that, and now you can see everything up on the screen. Maybe I'll make my text a little bit bigger for you. I'm going to go to format textiles just so that you can see it a little bit bigger, giving you other little tips as we go along here. There we go. Now that should be big enough on your screen, and you can see the resources that I've applied. Great. I've already saved this file, but I should show you how I did that because you want to be careful about this. I created a folder called master project file, and that folder is going to house all my current projects. So I would put my current projects into that folder, so I keep them all in the same location. And I called it project anywhere one. So you have a folder, and then you've got your project saved there. I'll say yes, we'll replace it. Now I'm going to do a file save as, and I'm going to put another file in that folder, but this time we're going to call this one project anywhere two. Save it. So now I'm in project anywhere two, as you can see from the top of the screen over there. And I'm going to change some stuff here just so it's different. We'll add a couple of days to everything. And there we go. And you know what? I'm going to change the start date, so I'm going to go to project, make it start on a different date, because likely if you had a separate project, it would start on a different date, so maybe a week down the road. And I'll click OK. And it moves everything, so my project's starting on a different time frame. I've got different durations over here, so that's good. Now I'm going to save that, and then I'm going to go file, save as. I'm going to create a third project under that master project file, and I will call this project anywhere three. And I'll go save. So I've saved this as project three. And what I actually should have done in project two was what I meant to do was I'm going to change that so it says project anywhere three. I'm going to save that. And I'm going to file, open project anywhere two. And I wanted to change that to two in project anywhere two. Just so that we can see these differences in the files as they come up. Right, so I've created three files. That could be a bathroom if you're a construction company, renovation, kitchen renovation, and maybe an addition, or maybe this could be custom house one, custom house two, custom house three. You can think about it, whatever projects maybe you have on the go, that they would be your separate files. Okay, so now I'm going to go file, new. And I'm going to go blank project. And I'm going to right away, I'm going to go file. I'm going to go save as. And so there's that master project file coming up again. So I'm going to click on that because I want them all to be housed in the same folder. And I'm going to go master project file. You can call it anything you want, but I'll just call it master project file. And so this is blank. It's got nothing in it. But I want to insert those other projects into this file. So I can see them all at the same time. Otherwise, I've got to flip back and forth, flip back and forth to look at them. I would like to see them all in the same folder. So I'm going to go sub project. And I'm going to go project anywhere number one. Now, you'll notice that you've got a choice here with insert. You could insert it as a read only file. So that means that if you made adjustments in the master project file, it wouldn't change the base file. I would suggest you have it as, you know, that could be useful if you're creating something and you just want to view them, but you don't want to interfere with those projects by accident, you know, clicking on something that could be useful. But if you actually want them to be linked to each other, you need to make sure that this is checked and that you just go insert. All right. So I'm just going to click insert. And that should be the default. That's the way it is. So if you didn't do anything, it would just insert it that way. And you can sort of see it's inserted here. The next one I would go down without opening it. I find if you open it and then I go down and I insert another project here, it tends to nest it under this project, which I don't want to do. I actually want my other projects to be sort of on the same level here. So that's why I'm going to have this all rolled up. And I'm going to go insert sub project again. So project anywhere number two, insert. And there you go. It's at the same level. If you for some reason inserted it underneath it, you could always delete it out and then do it again. Like I said, if I do this and now just to show you, if I go insert project anywhere number three and I go insert, it inserts it nested underneath here. Well, it doesn't let me outdent it at that point, like a regular summary task. So if that's not what I want, maybe there's a reason for a different one that's a sub of a sub, you might want to do that for. But generally, that's not the case. I can just delete this and it says continue to delete project anywhere three and it's subtask and you click OK. It deletes it from view. And then if I roll this up here and I put this right below. Now, if I go insert project anywhere three, it's inserted there. And I guess I kept the days the same. I had intended to change the start date on project anywhere three, but I didn't. You know what? I can go now. And so let's see if I went into project anywhere three and I change the days to let's say I change the days to 814. And I change that to 20. No, I'll change that one to 29. And I'll change this one to 30. There we go. So I've been changing the days on project anywhere number three here. And so now you can see it's quite a lot more days than project anywhere number two was. And if you recall, project anywhere number three was the same amount of days as project anywhere number two when I first started. All right. So now I just clicked save up here. And it says want to save changes to project anywhere three. That's the one I changed. And I can say yes. Yes to all will be any changes I made to any of them, right? Yes to just right now would be to number three. So I'm going to click yes to all so it doesn't keep prompting me. And that will automatically change all the changes if I had made some to the other ones. I don't think I did, but if I had, that would have made changes there. Now, if I go and I go check just my project anywhere three file, I still have it open here from before. If I go back and I check project anywhere number three, you see how it says 81 days. So project number anywhere number three is at 81 days. So it accepted the changes I made in the master project file. Now, if I change this to 10 days, right, then it's made that 83 days. Now, as long as I save this, it's saved it. Now I can go back down. And if I go into my master project file, it should say 83 days. And it does. Right. So it will accept those changes that are going across. The other thing is I can have these opened up, the various projects, and I can look at them on how they're matching up to each other. So right now I have all three projects open, and I can see the different dates that they are starting on. Now, there's some functions you may not be able to adjust here that you'll need to go back to your original project files. One of them is to set the project start date. So, for example, if you wanted to change the project start date, and I was in project anywhere number three, and say I go down here, I'd have to go down one level. And if I try and change that here, let's see what happens. If I want to change this, it's got the start date, the overall start date of my master project file. So it's just going with the earliest one. It's not going with the individual project. So if I actually want to change this project here, start date, I should, in that case, go back and go to project anywhere number three, and change the start date there. So if I go here, and I say I want to change this to July 5th, I click OK, it'll move that to July 5th now. So now that's starting July 5th. If I go back to my master project file, it will have changed to July 5th. There's some limitations on things where they cross over that you have when you have a master project file, but pretty much anything else that I want to do within the project file, add resources, take resources off, all of those kind of things I can do. So that's fairly easy to do in that master project file. For the most part, I find a master project file really helpful for just looking at this kind of stuff, where you've got overlaps occurring, and you're wondering how that's going to impact your ability to manage so many projects at the one time. It may make you say, you know what, this isn't working here because we want to have a little bit more time in between here. You could actually then just say, well, I need a little bit more time here, so I'm going to put a lag here, and I put that lag, and that maybe stops that overlap for a certain amount of period of time. Maybe if you knew what was going on in the specific project, it would be helpful for that way. It gets even more useful when you're sharing resources, because then you can really look at, do I have some resources over allocated between projects, and I'll highlight that for you, and I'll show you that in another upcoming video on creating a resource pool, which is a shared pool of resources. Because in this way, where we've got the resources, and they're separated out, and I've got similar names, it can get quite confusing when you go to the resource sheet. If I go to the resource sheet, you see they're all listed, and they're repeated, and it's like, well, which project is each one for? I don't know. So that would be very confusing with your resources. You can help yourself if you're doing that by inserting the column called Project. So if you go Insert Column, and you type P for Project, and you select Project, then it tells you the resources, which ones are from which project. So in other words, you can tell these are all from Project Anywhere 1. That's the project file. These are all from Project 2, and these are all from Project 3. So you can at least tell which ones are which project if you have overlaps of similar names. But still, I think that's a little bit clunky if you're going to be managing resources between projects, but it is useful to view your projects from a higher level and see what's going on between the projects. The other neat thing is this is a master project file, so it's a dynamic kind of file. You can delete projects from this, no problem. I'd roll it up first, just click on it, and press Delete. And it says, Project Anywhere is a summary task. Deleting will delete all of its subtasks. That's just deleting it from this file, though. It's not deleted from your folders or anything like that. You can go back in, and there's Project Anywhere. It's there. I can double-click it and open it. I think I had it open, but there it is. And you can see it, and it's fine. It's visible. It's still there. So you haven't lost it. That's not a problem that way. What I would suggest, what I would typically do is I would have a master project file with all my live files in it. And as soon as one project is finished or completed, then I just delete it from the master project file, and I insert whatever new project I have into it. So at least I can always do a quick look at high level, how my projects are and how they're interacting with each other from that perspective. You can get more advanced with this, to be sure, but this is a good starting point, I think, for you just to understand how it works. And to try it. Try it. Try changing days and seeing how that affects the second project anywhere. So I just change that. It's at 47. There it is. It's at 47. Change it here. You got another two. There it is. It's at 49. And if I go back to my master project file, there it is at 49. But I can also see how they are interplaying with each other. I can see that, oh, okay, well, the carpenter's not overlapping. That's where, again, as I said, I'd create a resource pool, so then it really becomes self-evident for that part. But at least my activities, I can get a good sense what's coming up with the big scheme picture of things. So that's what I wanted to cover off today. Fairly simple stuff. You just have to be a little bit careful. Test it out. Make sure that you've got your original files saved into that folder. You're not deleting your original files when you delete them from the master project file. They're still there. And it can be a dynamic process. So hopefully that's been a help for you for managing multiple projects. I'm Tom Stevenson, wishing you a wonderful day, and we'll see you next time. Bye for now. Oh, and also, before I forget, don't forget to click the subscribe icon so you can view future upcoming videos and look at the various playlists I have on project management, construction, business management, and all those nifty areas. And please click the notifications, and then you'll be kept up to date with everything. Your comments are always welcome, and if there's ideas or things that you'd like to learn in Microsoft Project, leave me a comment, and if I have time, I'll shoot a quick video. I'm Tom Stevenson once again, signing off. Bye for now.