From the course: Microsoft Project Tips Weekly

Edit multiple tasks simultaneously

From the course: Microsoft Project Tips Weekly

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Edit multiple tasks simultaneously

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- [Bonnie] Hi, I'm Bonnie Biafore. In this Project tip, I'll show you how to edit several tasks at the same time. The only limitation is that you have to make the same changes to all the tasks. The first thing you have to do is to select the tasks that you want to edit. In this case, let's say that I want to edit tasks 20 through 25. Because those are adjacent, I can drag over their task ID cells to select all of them. If I also want to edit task 31, repair issues, I can press the Control key and then click that task ID to add that task to the selection. Now that I have all of my tasks selected, there are two ways to get to the information dialog box. Up on the Task tab on the right side where it says Properties, you can click the Information button. The other way is to right click within your selection, somewhere where it's gray in the table. Then on the shortcut menu, choose Information, and that opens up the multiple task information dialog box, and that tells you that you're gonna make any changes that you set in this dialog box to all of your selected tasks. Now, some of the typical changes are things like changing the task type or maybe changing to auto schedule or manually schedule, changing the resources, or maybe even date constraints. So let's make a few changes to these selected tasks. For example, on the General tab where it says Schedule Mode, you can select Auto Scheduled to make them all auto scheduled. Or we could go to the Advanced tab, and then where it says Task Type, click the down arrow and choose Fixed Work to change those tasks to the fixed work task type. In this example, I'm also gonna change the resources, so I'm gonna click the Resources tab. Now, in the first Resource Name cell, let's say that I want to assign the architect. I'm gonna click in that cell, and then I start to type the architect's name, and Project, as soon as it finds a matching resource, puts it in the cell. So I'm done. I can go to the second Resource name cell. In this case, I can click the down arrow and choose the PM assistant if that's the other resource that I want. And let's say I'm gonna change the PM assistant to work 50% of the time. Now that I've made all of the changes that I want, I can click OK to close the multiple task information dialog box and apply the changes. When I do that, you can look over on the right side in the schedule and see that the architect and the PM assistant are both assigned at the percentages that we gave. In addition, if I double click one of those selected tasks, that opens up the regular task information dialog box, and let's go to the Advanced tab, and you can see that the task type for this task is fixed work. And that's how you can make the same changes to several tasks simultaneously.

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