#9 - D365 Project Operations Advent Calendar: Color up and organize your Project Plan like a pro!

#ProjectOperations #AdventCalendar

Hello and welcome to the 9th Episode of the Project Operations Advent Calendar 🎅🏼

I still don't have a common opening and now it's also too late already 😁 But no further complaining, let's jump right into this - and the weekend!

Colors! We want more colors in our life!

We already learned about the People's View and some hidden features behind an additional license.

But there is more - as a Project Manager or someone working with a task plan you may want to highlight and let information stand out, or group Project Tasks in a specific way.

Project Operations got you covered!

Conditional coloring

We all love colors right? I don't want to search through the whole project plan, critical or interesting information should be visible at a glance.

With Conditional coloring, available in your Grid view, this will be easier than you imagined.

You can set up small rules, similar to Advanced Find or Business Rules conditional - If Then clauses.

One of the most common functions and is super intuitive to use for yourself. No technical know-how is required at this point.

Clicking the Conditional coloring button in the grid will open up the dialog above. Just select the column of the task plan (1), the condition (2) - for example is less than for Number and dates or equals for User queries as seen here.

The last column holds your condition, the information you want to verify (3).

In this case, all Project Tasks which assigned to me should be highlighted in red. Danger. That guy wants to do something, we should maybe double-check that 😁

You can select a variety of colors, usually the pastel shades work best for me. The plain colors are quite intensive and I'm not sure I want to look at this type of red in the morning

With saving your small query the colors will be applied if the condition is met. Not the whole row will be colored but the column - just because you could have multiple conditions apply for one Task.

In our case, every Assigned to column is marked red with my contribution. Including the ones, I share the task with colleagues.

As well we highlight all Depends on columns that follow after Task #3 Conduct Market Analysis because of our second condition.

Label your Tasks

Colors are not enough? Do you want to text too? Okay. Fine. Labels it is!

Labels offer a similar coloring experience but as the name says you have the option to add text. You can use the out-of-the-box text which basically only describes the color you see - for accessibility perhaps a method that can help a lot.

Access the labels via the Grid view of your Project. Click on the small information icon of the desired task (1) to enter the Task details. In this view, right underneath the assigned resources, you will find the labels (2).

Select the desired Label here or rename the label based on your preference (3).

Labels are organized per Project. If I open up any other Project Plan, the labels here are back to default or named differently to your Project.

For our Task, we've now selected two custom labels with their colors:

Labels in the grid view are organized in the Labels column. You want to show it when working with them. The Label column can also be used to set Labels up per Task, rename them, or remove them. So you don't have to go into the Task Details every time.

Using labels as pure color coding or just for the sake of saving space, you can switch between two display modes. Especially with multiple labels per Task the available space you have gets easily occupied. Unless you have a super widescreen monitor to plan out your Project Plan 😁

Hide the label titles by clicking on the header column and turn off the Show option for the same. When clicking on a specific label the column will now expand it and you will be able to see the title again.

Labels are also available in other views than the Grid. They will be displayed in the Board and the People's View - if you're not using the Compact Mode

Both options highlight information pretty well and can help to identify specific information in bigger plans. I only hope your color choices are better than mine and your plans look even much better than mine 😁

Thank you for checking in today, hope you enjoyed today's advents calendar, and see you tomorrow 😊🎅🏼