Microsoft Project 2010 : Formatting and Sharing Your Plan (part 5) - Printing Views

5/13/2013 4:01:27 AM

5. Printing Views

Printing views allows you to put on paper just about anything you see on your screen. For a project with many tasks, what you can see on your screen at one time may be a relatively small portion of the full project. When using standard letter-sized paper, it might require several sheets to print the full project plan. For example, a Gantt Chart view of a six-month project with 100 or so tasks can require 12 or more letter-size pages to print in its entirety. Printing out of Project can use quite a bit of paper; in fact, some heavy-duty Project users make poster-size printouts of their project plans using plotters. Whether you use a printer or plotter, it’s a good idea to preview the views you intend to print.

In this exercise, you will see the Print Preview of the Gantt Chart and Timeline views.

On the File tab, click Print.

The Print Preview appears in the Backstage view with the Gantt Chart in the preview.

The Print Preview has several options to explore. You will start with the page navigation buttons in the lower-right corner of the screen. To observe the broader view of the output, you’ll switch to a multipage view.
Click Multiple Pages.

Multiple Pages

The full Gantt chart appears in the Print Preview. Assuming that you have a letter-size sheet as your paper size, you should see the Gantt chart spread across several sheets—what you see in the Print Preview may vary, depending on your specific printer. This is more information than you need to communicate right now, so you’ll adjust the Print Preview to include just the portion of the Gantt chart that covers the month of January.

Note

If you have a plotter selected as your default printer or have a different page size selected for your default printer, what you see in the Print Preview windows may differ from what’s shown here. The next several steps will assume that you see the Gantt Chart view split across four sheets.
Under Settings, on the left side of the Print Preview window, click Print Entire Project to display additional printing options.

These options let you customize what details will be printed.
Click Print Specific Dates.

Notice the two date fields directly below the Print Specific Dates setting. In the first date field, 1/2/2012 should already be selected. This is the project start date.
In the To date field, select 1/31/2012.

Project adjusts the Print Preview to include just the tasks that appear in the month of January.
Click the Task tab to close the Backstage view.

Next you will work with the Timeline view.
Click anywhere in the Timeline view.

This puts the focus on the Timeline. Project can print only a single view at a time, so when working with a split view, you must specify which view you intend to print.
On the File tab, click Print.

The Print Preview appears in the Backstage view.
Click Page Right to display the second page of the Timeline.

Page Right
Click Multiple Pages.

The entire Timeline view appears in the Print Preview window.

For a simple view like the Timeline, shrinking it to fit on a single page is fine for your communication needs. Next, you’ll adjust the page setup options.
Click Page Setup; this appears at the bottom of the controls, to the left of the print preview.

The Page Setup dialog box appears—note that the dialog box title includes the word "Timeline." You can customize the page setup options that apply to this particular view.
Make sure the Page tab is visible, and then, under Scaling, click Fit to 1 pages wide by 1 tall.
Click OK.

Project resized the Timeline print preview so it now fits on a single page.
Click the Task tab to close the Backstage view.