On Time! on Track! on Target!: Managing Your Projects Successfully with Microsoft Project [With CDROM]

Okay, let's be clear. If you already have been using MS Project and you understand the various processes of PM pretty well, you'll likely only get a few good tips to help you improve how you manage your projects and use of MS Project. But if like myself, you have been told here's a project for you and you have little to no project management training (other that your own good sense of how to plan, thus any mother or father could handle most projects! ;) ), this book is very helpful and especially so for gaining a quick sense of "I can do this!" and "I can do this with MS Project, Excel, Word, etc., the tools I many have already at work (or even with similar products like Open Office, etc.) I purchased this book as part of a bundle (thus it was free) along with MS Project 2003 a few years ago and I still use it to help me understand certain aspects of project management (now that I'm finally really doing projects at work) where as I've hardly ever used the MS Project 2003 book (mainly because now I have the 2007 version and "Microsoft Project 2007, The Missing Manual" is a better aid for me (again someone who prefers simple, layman terminology to understand software even though I'm far from a beginner with using MS products). So, again, if you're an IT tech-type or PM guru who's been using MS Project, already PM certified and prefer tekkie lingo when using a reference book to find a detailed way to solve a MS Project software problem you have, this is not the book for you. But for any newbies or immediate level users who want to understand the PM process and how and when a software tool (in particular MS software tools) can help you within that process, you should definitely try this book out. And hey, you can look at various online stores who offers a "pre-read" if you'd like to make sure before you purchase it!

I wrote this book and it is supposed to be a book about project management with some tips about using Microsoft Project and other programs effectively to manage projects. It is not intended to be a how-to guide for Microsoft Project from start to finish, although it includes techniques that I use all the time to manage projects. I am a PMI-certified Project Management Professional and I manage projects for clients in many industries. The motivation to write this book came from the advice I've had to provide to new (and some more experienced) project managers on many projects. The idea is to help people relatively new to project management learn about the tasks they should perform to manage a project successfully and how to use Project and other Microsoft programs practically in those endeavors. For example, some folks break down work into way too much detail and try to track it all in Project. This book explains how to figure out how far to break work down and where to store all the details that don't go into a PRoject schedule. The book also includes tips for using Word, Excel, Access, and other programs in project management tasks. The book was published by Microsoft Press, hence the reference to Microsoft Project in the book title. I am sorry if the title is misleading--I can't do anything about that.