Introduction to colour-coding tasks and allocations

You use code libraries to colour-code your bars, tasks and allocations so that their appearance represents something relevant to you. For example, you might use codes to show:

High, medium or low risk factor.
The different office locations at which tasks take place.
The different departments or people responsible for each task.

Once you have assigned codes, you can filter for bars, tasks or allocations with specific codes. For example, you could filter for all the high risk tasks, or all the tasks being carried out at the US office.

You can display more than one code library at a time on the bar chart. If you do this, you need to specify the order in which the code libraries are used to colour tasks, to deal with situations in which tasks have been assigned codes from more than one of the code libraries that are displayed. You choose which code libraries you want to view on the bar chart by selecting them via the Tasks tab of the Format Bar Chart dialog or via the project view. You can also choose whether to display the codes that are assigned to whole bars, or the codes that are assigned to individual tasks.

For each code library, you can specify whether it is possible to assign more than one code from the library to each individual object in the project. To do this:

Right-click the code library folder in Library Explorer and select Properties. The Code Library Properties dialog appears.
Select the Single select check box to specify that it should only be possible to assign a single code from the code library to each individual object in the project, or clear the check box to specify that it should be possible to assign more than one code from the library to each individual object.
Click Close.

By default critical tasks are highlighted with a red outline, but if you assign red task codes, it might not be clear which tasks are on the critical path. You can use the Critical Style field on the Code Library Properties dialog to change the critical appearance of a code library to choose a colour other than red for critical marking. For example, if you want to use red task codes in your Risk Factor code library, you could set the critical appearance of that code library to a blue dotted line so that critical tasks with red codes can still be distinguished on the bar chart.