Create a new task in Project Online

To create a new task in an enterprise project:

1. On the Quick Launch, click Projects.

2. Click the name of an existing project in the list.

3. On the Task tab, click Edit.

   Note:  If you want to create new tasks by using Microsoft Project Professional, click the down arrow on the Edit button, and then click In Microsoft Project.

4. Enter a new task by using one of the following methods:

   • Enter the task information in the blank row at the bottom of the list.

   • Copy and paste tasks from another program, such as Microsoft Excel.

   • Insert a new task between two existing tasks. Click the row that you want to appear under the new task, and then press Insert on your keyboard, or click Insert in the Tasks group on the Task tab.

     Tip:  Consider adding the Task Name, Duration, Start date, and/or Finish date. Read Choose between automatically or manually scheduling a task for more information on including these details.

     Assigning a lot of people to your task?    It’s best to use Project Professional when you need to assign a lot of people, or other resources, to a task. To do this, finish adding your task here, and then open the project in Project Professional to assign resources.

5. When you have finished adding tasks, click Close to check the project back in.

After you have created tasks in your enterprise project, there are several things you may want to do to further clarify your project’s schedule, share your new tasks with others, or track the progress of your tasks.

You may want to:

• Indent or outdent tasks to create a hierarchy.

• Link tasks to show relationships between them.

• Add tasks to the timeline on the Schedule page and in the Project Center.

• Publish your project so that the tasks are available to the project team.

• Set a baseline for your project, to compare your plans as the project progresses.

Choose between automatically or manually scheduling a task

Tasks in your project can be automatically scheduled by the Project Web App scheduling engine, or they can be manually scheduled, maintaining the duration, start date, and finish date that you enter.

To change scheduling modes, choose one of these options:

• Select Auto scheduled or Manually scheduled from the drop-down list in the Mode column for the task row.

• Click once in the task row to select it, and then, on the Task tab, in the Editing group, click Manually Schedule or Auto Schedule.

If you choose to automatically schedule a task in your project, that task’s duration, start date, and finish date are determined by Project Web App, which takes many different factors into consideration. If the task is dependent on other tasks or deliverables, the dates for those items are taken into account if your task is automatically scheduled. Project Web App also considers resource availability, work hours, and calendars. If Project Web App is integrated with Microsoft Exchange Server, automatic scheduling can even take into account the out-of-office time that resources have entered on their Outlook calendars.

Manually scheduling a task can be helpful if you want greater control over the dates and durations in your project’s schedule, or if you don’t have enough detail about a project’s tasks to accurately build a schedule automatically. When you choose to manually schedule a task in your project, the duration, start date, and finish date for the task is not changed by the Project Web App scheduling engine. These values will remain where you set them, even if not every detail in the project supports them. You can even use descriptive statements in the Duration, Start, and Finish boxes, rather than numeric values. For example, you might know that the duration for a task is “About a week” or that a task should begin “Mid-October.”

Use top-down summary tasks for high-level planning

While you plan a project, you may only have some high-level information about major milestones. In Project Web App, you can still plan your project, even without work estimates or details about what tasks might be involved. Instead of entering the task-level details about your project, you can take a top-down approach by creating high-level summary phases based on the overall timeline of your project.

1. Create tasks    Create tasks that represent what you know about the project. Use the procedure from earlier in this article.

2. Indent subtasks    Indent subtasks under summary tasks to represent different stages or phases within the project.

3. Enter dates or durations    Enter dates or durations at the summary task level to manually schedule the summary task so that the dates and durations of the subtasks do not roll up to the summary task.