Elements of the Project Guide

The three main elements of the Project Guide are the toolbar, the side pane, and the main view area as shown in the following figure.

Project Guide Elements

Project Guide Toolbar

The Project Guide toolbar is the top level of a navigation hierarchy that organizes Project into phases or goal areas that correspond to users' goals. Project displays the Project Guide toolbar by default, in addition to the Standard toolbar.

The default Project Guide toolbar displays four goal areas: Tasks, Resources, Track, and Report. These goal areas represent the major project management phases of planning tasks, managing resources, tracking the project after it is underway, and reporting and analyzing project data.

The default Project Guide contains four goal areas that are displayed on the Project Guide toolbar: Tasks, Resources, Track, and Report. These goal areas represent the major project management phases of planning tasks, managing resources, tracking the project once it is underway, and reporting and analyzing project data. These goal areas were selected after extensive research and usability testing to discover how users group and categorize typical project management activities. However, you can customize the default Project Guide to change these goal areas and the list of tasks each goal area contains. For more information about the default goal areas and tasks, see Default Project Guide Files.

Project Guide Side Pane

Side panes display tasks within each goal area. The Project Guide shows only one side pane at a time. There can be many side panes within one goal area; the Project Guide shows them in sequence for tasks within the goal area.

Side panes are used for navigation within a particular goal area. When a user clicks a goal area in the Project Guide toolbar, the side pane displays a list of tasks for that goal area. For example, when a user clicks Tasks on the default Project Guide toolbar, the side pane displays a list of activities that should be completed as part of planning the tasks in a project, such as listing the tasks, organizing them into phases, and scheduling them.

After the user selects a particular task, the side pane displays the content for that task. A side pane can contain the controls for accomplishing the task, as well as links to related tasks, domain information, help, feedback, and status text.

Main View Area

The region to the right of the Project Guide side pane is the main viewing and editing area. The main view area displays views of project data. It can also be used to show custom views such as Web pages from Project Server, or even custom Web content. For more information about custom views, see Custom Views and the LoadWebBrowserControl Method.

The main view area content changes depending on the activity you are following in the Project Guide. For example, if you are entering tasks, the main view area displays a Gantt Chart. However, when you start doing the Enter Resource Information step of the Project Guide, the main view area changes to show the resource sheet.