Product Description

Office Project Standard 2007 gives you robust project management tools with the right blend of usability, power, and flexibility, so you can manage projects more efficiently and effectively. You can stay informed, control project work, schedules, and finances, and keep project teams aligned, while becoming more productive through integration with familiar Microsoft Office system programs, powerful reporting options, as well as guided planning, wizards, and templates.

Main Features

Understand and Control Project Schedules and Finances:

Effectively Communicate and Present Project Information:

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #752 in Software
• Brand: Microsoft
• Model: 076-03745
• Released on: 2007-01-30
• Platform: Windows XP
• Format: CD-ROM
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.50" h x 5.40" w x 7.30" l, .61 pounds

Features

• Easy-to-use software helps you manage projects more efficiently than ever before so you can keep your business on track
• Helps you effectively track and analyze projects with a better understanding of the schedule and impact of changes; benefit from better financial control and richer analytics
• Improved Task Drivers help you determine the factor (such as task dependency, calendar constraints, schedule date, or vacation time) driving the start date of the task
• Smart tags alert you to alternatives when you make changes to your plan; create your own custom template, or use one of the many new, out-of-the-box templates
• Automatically highlights all items that shift as a result of the most recent change; delivers flexible project tracking and analysis by helping you to compute and track core metrics unique to your project

Amazon.com
Office Project Standard 2007 helps you manage projects more efficiently than ever before so you can keep your business on track. Stay informed and control project work, schedules, and finances, keep project teams aligned, and be more productive through integration with familiar Microsoft Office system programs, powerful reporting, guided planning, and flexible tools. Access built-in online Help to get the latest training, articles, templates, and resources and enjoy timely and relevant assistance as you work with smart tags that alert you to alternatives when you make changes to your plan. Save time by either creating your own custom template, or using one of the many new, out-of-the-box templates. Flexibility, versatility, and creativity--Project 2007 delivers it all with enhanced tools and an user-friendly design.

Visual highlights of a change's impacts are indicated in light green. View larger.

The Gantt view with the Project Guide Tasks pane showing on the left. View larger.

With Multiple Level Undo you can safely experiment with various what-if scenarios. View larger.

Visual Reports creates templates in Excel or Visio Professional. View larger.

Understand and Control Project Schedules
Project 2007 helps you effectively track and analyze projects with a better understanding of the schedule and impact of changes, while also allowing you to benefit from better financial control and richer analytics. This application now offers the ability to quickly determine factors that are affecting task dates and easily trace the source of issues. Specifically, improved Task Drivers help you determine the factor (such as task dependency, calendar constraints, schedule date, or vacation time) driving the start date of the task, so you can follow a chain of factors back to find the root cause of a particular delay. Project 2007 also automatically highlights all items that shift as a result of the most recent change you make. You can even undo actions or sets of actions from macros, and that allows you to test several "what-if" scenarios in order to fully understand the implications of each choice while making scope alterations.

Effectively Communicate and Present Project Information
Project Standard 2007 offers scheduling power and enhanced capabilities that can help improve the organization of your projects. Easily report and communicate information in various formats according to the needs of stakeholders. New leverage charts and diagrams will capture attention, thanks to the Visual Reports feature, which uses Excel and Visio Professional to produce PivotTable views, charts, graphs, and diagrams based on Project data. You can also enjoy the option of changing the background color of a cell or row with Background Cell Highlighting. Shade cells, similar to how you can in Excel, in order to convey additional meaning. In addition, any user can easily define custom report templates and share these with other Project users.

Background Cell Highlighting. View larger.

Flexible Project Tracking
Project 2007 delivers flexible project tracking and analysis by helping you to compute and track core metrics unique to your project by defining custom fields based on your formulas. And to help keep you on track, graphical indicators can alert you when specific conditions are met.

Improved Views and Sharing
With new enhancements to the Calendar interface and the addition of 3-D Gantt bars, Project 2007 lets you create even more visually effective reports. When it's time to share them, use Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services workspaces (requires Microsoft Windows Server 2003 or later), which are integrated into the Tasks pane of the Project Guide, a step-by-step, interactive aid that helps you set up projects, manage tasks and resources, track status, and report project information. This helps you better organize work and people to help ensure projects are delivered on time and within budget.

Easily Control Finances
Project 2007 features a budget field that lets you assign budgets to projects and programs. The new "Cost" resource type improves cost estimation and tracking, thanks to enhancements like more predefined fields, such as cost code, that map to financial fields tracked in project accounting systems.

For all these same features plus a Client Access License (CAL), which enables connection to Office Project Server 2007 and thus provides additional collaborative enterprise project management capabilities, take a look at Office Project Professional 2007.

Customer Reviews

Project 2003 works better
I have used pretty much every version of MS Project there has been over the last 10 years. This is the first version that I have had problems with.

First, let me talk about the good. This really does help with visualization of projects. Especially when making changes to an existing project. I really like that when you make a change it shows you the effects on other items.

Now the bad, printing schedules is broken. Anytime you change the scale, things look really bad. Text gets cut off and task bars don't scale propertly. I have corrsponded on MS forums and they agree that scaling doesn't work well. For me, this is a deal breaker.

I have also had problems with Project changing the constraint types on some pretty complex projects. This is simple enough to fix if you notice it, but it is truely annoying.

I have had none of these problems with MS Project 2003 and I still prefer MS Project to other scheduling options on the market.

Basically, I recommend buying Project 2003, at least until they work the bugs out of this one.

Not as bad as others would have you believe
My first attempt to own Microsoft Projects was to buy the 2003 version. In general, Microsoft did best in 2003. I was rough on Microsoft Office 2007 for good reason: it is not an improvement over 2003. After getting bogus software I bit the bullet and bought Projects 2007; the guy who provided it said it ran fine on his machine.

All in all, this software is adequate. I am only disappointed in that I expected more after years of development. I used an Gantt chart program developed by Symantec in the 1990s; I always suspected that MS stole the core software but this the nature of the business: "Yo, ho, ho... it's the pirate's life for me."

Other reviewers will tell you that the software won't work with the web. I really don't care. If you want that, pay the extra for Primavara. If you want Pert charts, Gantt charts and want to do it simple, with your eyes closed, then this is the software for you. Avoid the other planning software that you can google. Go with Microsoft Projects. The other software will nickle and dime you with add-ins.

They did improve this software over early versions. I used Projects 2000 and it was clumsy and hard to edit. Oh, and by the way, there really is no good training material with this software. I looked at "Projects for Dummies" and was not impressed. I did buy a book on details but don't expect to use it. Microsoft Projects is really a hands-to-learn software. So, dig into your wallet and buy this software. It really is a good deal, not a great deal, but a good deal.

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Rough Start
I'm running on Vista. Unlike what is specified at the top of Amazon's page for Project, the platform for Project 2007 is NOT just XP. All Microsoft 2007 products are Vista compatible (or so I'm told). At any rate, Project works on my Vista machine.

Sort of. I've never used Project before, although I'm highly experienced with Excel, Word, Power Point, and other Micrsoft products. I've always had staff doing my cost-schedule engineering, but now I'm running my own company so I thought I'd give Project a go.

First, there is very little that is intuitive about this program. I just recently received my "Project 2007 for Dummies" book and am really glad I made that purchase, because I was ready to set fire to this product.

For example, where I work we have no Sat/Sun weekends (Afghanistan). But Project doesn't agree with that schedule. It was extremely frustrating to select a Saturday to start a task, and Project automatically changing it to Monday. It would be understandable if it gave you a prompt or a warning about working weekends, but instead it simply refused to allow you to pick a weekend day for a task.

It took me about an hour going through the Help Online thing to figure out how to make Project allow me to work on a Satruday. I was fully expecting to feel like an idiot and find some simple way to tell Project to ignore weekend constraints. But I found that doing so is actually a multi-step process (about 7 steps, few intuitive) to get Project to allow me to start work on the day I wanted. Ridiculous.

And the Help that comes with the software doesn't work. When I clicked on Help, it said it has to configure and install Help. So I waited for the task bar to go all the way across after several minutes, and then it required a reboot for the changes to take effect. After reboot, I started up the program fresh, clicked Help, and went through the same thing all over again. After the third time, I was spitting nails. Hence the need to go to on-line Help (not your first choice in Afghanistan).

You know, if there's one part of any software that should NOT be messed up, it's Help.

Bottom Line: Bugs; not intuitive at all. But it does seem to work mostly, and I acknowledge I'm a PRoject rookie. I did finally produce my simple schedule, hence the 3 stars and not 2 or 1.