Viewing and editing a project's master plan

What the master plan displays

The project's master plan is displayed in the form of a spreadsheet and Gantt chart. Each activity in the master plan appears on its own row in the spreadsheet and Gantt chart. Scroll bars appear at the right of and beneath the master plan if there are more activities than can be displayed on the screen at one time. Click and drag these scroll bars to scroll around the master plan.

The Gantt chart displays each activity graphically, with a date zone at the top so that you can see when each activity takes place. The Gantt chart displays different types of activities as follows:

Activity type	Appearance
Activity
Activity with one or more project tags assigned
Activity that has been included in a pull plan
Milestone
Summary task
Summary task with one or more project tags assigned
Summary task that has been included in a pull plan

The colours of activities, milestones and summary tasks can be set by the project tags that are applied to them.

The Gantt chart displays links between activities as follows - the direction of the arrow indicates the direction of the link:

Link type	Appearance
Finish-to-Start
Start-to-Finish
Start-to-Start
Finish-to-Finish

The spreadsheet displays the name, start date, finish date and percentage progress of each activity.

Filtering the activities that are displayed using dates and project tags

You can filter the activities that are displayed in the master plan according to the dates at which the activities are planned to take place and according to the project tags that have been assigned to any of the activities or their pull plans or tasks. For example, you could filter the master plan so that it displays:

Only activities that are planned to take place in a particular month.
Only activities with pull plans or tasks that have been tagged as 'Residential'.
Only activities with pull plans or tasks that have been tagged as 'High Risk' and 'Refurbishment'.
Only activities that are planned to take place in a particular six week period and that have pull plans or tasks that have been tagged as 'First Floor' and 'Decoration'.

If you filter activities by date, any activities that take place partially within the date range are included in the display. For example, if you filter for activities that take place between 10th and 14th April, an activity that started on 5th April and finished on 11th April would be displayed, even though only part of the activity takes place within the specified date range. This is illustrated below; note how grey shading is used in the Gantt chart to highlight dates that lie outside the filter range:

Grey shading highlights the areas of the Gantt chart outside the filter range

To filter the activities that are displayed in the master plan:

Click the Date Range dates above the bar chart and select a start date, an end date, or both, to filter the activities according to the dates at which they are planned to take place.
Click Next 6 Weeks to filter the activities so that only those that are planned to take place during the next six weeks are displayed.
Click the Project Tags dropdown above the bar chart and select one or more tags to filter the activities according to the project tags that have been assigned to any of the activities or their pull plans or tasks. Clear a project tag's check box to remove it from the filter.

To remove all filters from the master plan, click Clear Filters.

If a summary task meets your filter criteria, but none of the activities within the summary task meet the criteria, the summary task is displayed as an activity with a duration of one day and may be displayed on the wrong date.

Specifying the scale of the master plan display

You can 'zoom in' and ' zoom out' of the master plan display by specifying its scale using the Scale control at the top-right of the bar chart:

The Scale control

To specify the scale of the master plan display:

Click Days to view the activities that are planned over the course of a few weeks in detail.
Click Weeks to view the activities that are planned over the course of a few months.
Click Months to view the activities that are planned over the course of a larger number of months.

Expanding and contracting summary tasks

Each summary task summarises a 'summary group' - a collection of 'child activities'. You can expand a summary task to display the contents of its summary group, or contract it to hide the contents of the summary group.

To expand a summary task that is currently contracted, click Right-pointing arrow to the left of the summary task's name in the spreadsheet. The activities in the summary group are displayed immediately beneath the summary task.

To contract a summary task that is currently expanded, click Downwards-pointing arrow to the left of the summary task's name in the spreadsheet. The activities in the summary group are hidden from the spreadsheet and bar chart.

To expand all summary tasks, click a plus symbol at the top-left of the spreadsheet; to contract all summary tasks, click a minus symbol .

Editing the activities in a master plan

You can use the following controls to edit the master plan's activities:

Control	Description
	This control appears in summary task rows. Click this control in a summary task row to create an activity at the bottom of that summary group; to create an activity at the bottom of the master plan, click this control to the left of the header of the 'Name' column in the spreadsheet.
	Click this control to edit the details of an activity.
	Click this control to delete an activity. A popup appears, asking if you are sure that you want to delete the activity and any associated links. Click Yes to delete the activity.