Microsoft Project 2007: The Missing Manual

Schedules, budgets, communications, resources. Projects big and small include them all, and Microsoft Project 2007 can help you control these variables — not be controlled by them. But Project is complex software, and learning it is, well, a project in itself. Get up to speed fast with Microsoft Project 2007: The Missing Manual. Written by project management expert Bonnie Biafore, this book teaches you how to do everything from setting budgets and tracking schedules to testing scenarios and recognizing trouble spots before your project breaks down.

Find out what's new in Project 2007 from previous versions, and get help choosing the right edition, whether it's Project Standard, Project Professional, or Enterprise Project Management Solution. With Microsoft Project 2007: The Missing Manual, you get more than a simple software how-to. You also get a rundown on project management basics and plenty of solid advice on how to use Project to:

• Define your project and plan your approach
• Estimate your project, set up a budget, define tasks, and break the work into manageable chunks
• Create a schedule, define the sequence of work, and learn the right way to use date constraints and deadlines
• Build a project team and assign resources to tasks: "who does what"
• Refine the project to satisfy objectives by building reality into the schedule, and learn to keep project costs under control
• Track progress and communicate with team members via reports, information sharing, and meetings that work
• Close out your project and take away valuable lessons for the future

Big and small projects alike include schedules, budgets, communications, and changes. This guide teaches readers how to track and adjust schedules and budgets, test scenarios, and understand the impact of changes.

Bonnie Biafore is an award-wining author of more than a dozen books, including Missing Manuals on Quicken 2009, QuickBooks 2009, and Project 2007, as well as The Better Investing Stock Selection Handbook, Online Investing Hacks, and On Time! On Track! On Target!. She also writes regularly about financial topics for Better Investing bankrate.com and interest.com. As an engineer, she's fascinated by how things work and how to make things work better, and has a knack for mincing dry subjects like accounting and project management into easy-to-understand morsels and spicing them up with her warped sense of humor.