Using templates to speed up task activity creation

As well as being able to create task activities individually, you can use task activity templates to speed up the creation of commonly-used sets of task activities.

If you need to assign the same set of task activities to a number of tasks, you can save those task activities as a task activity template. For example, you may have a commonly-used set of Plastering task activities, or Concreting task activities. You can then add the template's task activities to any number of tasks without having to create each individual task activity for each task.

There are two ways of creating task activity templates: you can either create them from scratch, or create them from a list of task activities that already exists on a task.

To create a task activity template from scratch:

  1. In Library Explorer, display the Task Activity Template library.
  2. Right-click a blank area of the list view, then select New Task Activity Template. A new template is created, with the name initially set to 'Untitled'.
  3. Right-click the template and select Properties. The Task Activity Template Properties dialog appears.
  4. Enter a descriptive name for the task activity template in the Name field.
  5. Click Add to add new task activities to the grid. For each activity, specify and name and a weighting value, which indicates the relative importance of the task activity in determining the progress of the task.
  6. Rearrange the order of task activities by selecting them and clicking Move Up and Move Down; remove any unwanted task activities by selecting them and clicking Remove.
  7. Click Close.

To create a task activity template from an existing list of task activities:

  1. Right-click the task that contains the task activities that you want to save as a template, and select Properties. The Bar and Task Properties dialog appears.
  2. Click the Task tab, then click Task Activities in the left pane of the dialog. The grid on this page displays a list of all task activities that have been associated with the task.
  3. Right-click the Activities grid and select Create Activity Template. The Task Activity Template Properties dialog appears. The grid on the dialog displays the task activities that were associated with the task.
  4. Amend the list of task activities if necessary, then click Close.

To assign the task activities from a task activity template to a task:

  1. Right-click the task and select Properties. The Bar and Task Properties dialog appears.
  2. Click the Task tab, then click Task Activities in the left pane of the dialog. The grid on this page displays a list of all task activities that have been associated with the task.
  3. Select the template in which the task activities are defined in the field beneath the grid then select Add From Template.

    If you add a predefined list of task activities from a template, they are added beneath any existing task activities. If a task has an existing task activity with an identical name to one of the activities in the template, a warning is displayed and none of the task activities from the template are added to the task.
  4. Click Close.

Related Topics:

Breaking down tasks into smaller steps using task activities

Creating task activities

Progressing tasks using task activities

Task activities fields