New Features for MS Project

Microsoft is hard at work on Project 2007, due to roll out later this year alongside the next version of MS Office. Here are two features that ought to be popular with anyone who’s spent any time at all working with Project:

"Multiple Levels of Undo: There was a post from Dieter’s Project blog about this feature. As he explained, it was an incredibly hard to implement feature but amazingly rewarding to see customers reaction! Project “12” will support multiple level of undo but we have gone beyond that and also support custom batching of VB code. What that means is that you can wrap any VB code with new functions that will become an undoable action. This is great if you have custom Add Ins or have extended applications running with Project.

"Task Drivers: Many of our customers had some problems finding out what happened to the schedule, so Project “12” has this new feature called Task Drives. A common question you may have when looking at your project schedule would be “why has a task moved to a certain date?” Now, you are able to select that task and see what is driving that task to be at the state it’s currently in."

Sounds like initial user response has been positive, to say the least:

I thought that this was a funny story about the Project Conference.

During Tuesday’s keynote by our GM, Mike showed off multi-level undo in Project. Our VP was sitting in the audience and heard the person next to him gasp and say "Oh My God …" The audience burst into applause after seeing Mike undo a bunch of actions.

I admit I never asked myself why this hadn’t been implemented yet; I was simply content to be annoyed it hadn’t been.. Apparently it was quite a technical challenge to make happen.

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