Top 5 Reasons Why I Like Microsoft Project 2007 Over 2003

By: Tanya Foster

Lately I’ve been working in both Project 2003 and Project 2007 and it has really dawned on me that some of the new features in Project 2007 are really great, so I thought I would list them here. 

1.       Multilevel Undo

Okay… this might sound silly, but the multilevel undo feature is awesome!  I know that it took several years for them to get this programmed, but wow is it worth it for the end user!   In Project 2003 you only had one undo.  That is so limiting when you are working with lots of tasks and dates.  You make several changes and then realize that something isn’t right, but you can only undo the last change that you made and it’s not the one causing the problem.  So you have to close the project without saving changes, just so you can go back and start all over again!  Very frustrating sometimes, but with Project 2007, you no longer have that problem. 

2.       Change Highlighting

How many times have you made a change in Project 2003 and had to hit the undo button just to see if it changed any other tasks?  C’mon… you know what I’m talking about!  It’s happened to all of us at some point or another.  You just keep hitting the undo and redo buttons until you can finally see how it’s impacting your overall schedule.  Well, in Project 2007 you don’t have to keep hitting undo and redo, because there is a change highlighting feature!  Anytime you make a change to your schedule, the cells that are impacted are highlighted.  So if you make a change to task 4 and that change impacts tasks 5, 6 & 7 in any way, tasks 5,6, & 7 will be highlighted!  To me, this feature alone is worth upgrading to Project 2007!

3.       Task Drivers

Just one click of the task drivers button, and you will have at your fingertips a list of tasks that affect the start date of the specific task that you have selected.  This feature has saved me countless hours of staring at the Gantt chart trying to figure out what’s causing my task date to be wacky.  I love, love, love this feature!

4.       Programs (or Master Projects)

Project 2003 supported Master Projects, but the functionality was very limited compared to Project 2007.  You can create a Master Project, insert all of the sub projects and manage them all in this one Master Project.  Any changes that you make to a subproject will automatically take effect in the individual schedule.  You don’t have to make the changes in both places!  You can link tasks between projects, change task names, update durations, and it’s all visible within this one Master Project.  And now you can see Master Projects within a single Project Center view where before!  Very handy feature indeed.

5.       Team Resources

So you have a team of people who are going to be working on several particular tasks in your schedule.  Maybe these resources all have the same skill set and you don’t know who’s going to be doing which specific task.  You can assign these resources to a team, assign the team to the tasks, and they can go and assign themselves to the task.  I think this is a great feature that will get a lot of use in Project 2007.

Well… There are my Top 5 Reasons.  Once I got started, I realized that maybe I should have done my top 10 because there are just so many great new features in Project 2007!  Maybe I’ll do another blog on this topic and list Another 5 Reasons Why I Like Microsoft Project 2007 over 2003… Stay tuned to find out!

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