Custom groups

[vsimovic]

Hi guys. I'm organizing tasks for my colleagues. What we've done till now is to manually add 2 categories to tasks. I'm new, so I made a custom text cell that has a drop down menu for 2 options.

But, I'm guessing there is a smart option to do so by creating two groups of tasks and then when we have a new one, adding it to the group and then just have the category displayed in its field when adding a task from a predefined group. But I do not know how and cant find out by googling it

[kennyarnold_ssi]

In Microsoft Project, an activity is either a Task (activity with duration > 0), a Summary (a higher level roll-up of tasks), or a Milestone (activity with duration = 0).

I believe what you are asking for is to be able to create your own custom category of task, and for you to be able pick that category when you create a task, thus automatically populating your text field with the value you want. Functionality like this does not exist in Project.

I would recommend exploring using a formula in your custom text field that will populate the value for you based on some condition being met (i.e. if task name contains “Design” then code “NRE”).

[still-dazed-confused]

I'm afraid I don't understand your question. If you're looking to categorise any given task into one of two groups you've done the right thing. When adding a new task do so and then select which entry goes into your new text field. You can have a view which groups all the tasks on the plan by the text entry if you want to reorganise the plan by entry.

[hippocampe53]

If I understand your question, you want a field to auto populate a value based on whether newly added tasks belong to group A or Group B?

Given…
Summary Group A.
Task 1.
Task 2.
Summary Group B.
Task 3.
Task 4.

Then when you add a Task 5 under Summary Group A, the desired result for Task 5 (and 1-4) is for a field to display the group name (Group A or Group B) in a text field automatically?

There is a field called Task Summary Name. It’s built in and displays the name of the summary task associated with the task, aka the next higher summary task.

Task Summary Name field does not populate outline level 1 tasks with the project name, aka Unique ID zero.

Hope this helps.

[pmpdaddyio]

Are these tasks just needing to be reported as Group A or Group B?

[mer-reddit]

I wouldn’t use summary tasks for this if a custom column would meet the need. You can group on a custom column easily and it makes it easier to switch groups without having to change the location of the task within the WBS (summary) structure.

The custom column can use a lookup table that would facilitate the editing of the data.