Demonstrating how to develop a schedule in manual mode and transitioning to auto-scheduled tasks increases the learning curve. Andrew Makar is an IT program manager and is the author of How To Use Microsoft Project and Project Management Interview Questions Made Easy.

For more information, read Microsoft's tips and tricks on user-controlled scheduling and also check out the Project 2010 demo videos. Andrew Makar is an IT program manager and is the author of How To Use Microsoft Project and Project Management Interview Questions Made Easy.

Drawing on PMI best practice this guide explains why Project Managers should avoid linking summary tasks in Microsoft Project.

We explain what summary tasks are and clarify the problems with linking summary activities.

User-controlled scheduling enables you to develop project schedules with or without Microsoft Project's scheduling engine.

With the release of Microsoft Project 2010, project managers have the option of scheduling tasks manually or letting Microsoft Project schedule the task start and end dates using the scheduling engine.

When I first heard about this feature, I was convinced it was dumbing down project schedule development.

Inexperienced Microsoft Project users often complain about Microsoft Project's sudden date changes when changes are made to resource, duration, or project dates; manual scheduling eliminates these concerns, but the trade-off is the loss of benefits from the scheduling engine.

When you're conducting high-level planning, the manual scheduling mode can be combined with the Timeline View in Microsoft Project to create a phase-level view of the project (Figure B).