Once you're familiar with Microsoft Project and used it to create project schedules you may well have created a project baseline, and then tracked tasks progress against this baseline. However your project plan might change once you've started tracking, so you decide to save the baseline again. Project lets you overwrite the original baseline, so you lose the original baseline data. But did you know that you can save and keep multiple baselines, and then display one or more on your Tracking Gantt view. This article describes how to do this using a clear easy to follow example.

When you save a baseline in Project, all Project table data is saved, so just be aware that the resulting file size can increase considerably. When you save a baseline, you are given the option of which baseline to save. The default baseline is date stamped once saved so you can easily identify it. You can also save up to nine other baselines within the same project file. In this article we'll save a first Baseline, amend the plan, and then save another as Baseline1. Then we'll cover how to display both baselines. So once your project schedule is created, save the baseline, keeping default name baseline and, all tasks. Then switch to Tracking Gantt view and you'll see the baseline as the second set of grey bars in addition to the original plan.

Saving an additional baseline

To see the changes more clearly, suppose the Project start date is delay, say, for a week. Make this change, and the actual plan on the Gantt chart is moved forward by a week. You can change the start date by any amount you wish, as long as you can see the change in the tracking Gantt chart. Now you decide to save this revised plan as another baseline. Sometimes you might want to keep a record of different baselines as part of a project audit trail, so in this example you choose to save Baseline1 and for all tasks. We're going to display both baselines shortly, so to see this clearly, move your project plan forward AGAIN by another week. We're doing this so that the revised plan, and baseline1 and baseline will each show on different dates. Switching back to tracking Gantt view if necessary, you see that only the first baseline is displayed with the project plan.

Displaying an additional baseline

We're now going to customise the Bar Styles for the Tracking Gantt. Sometimes the resulting display can become cluttered particularly if you display several baselines. You might therefore consider copying the Tracking Gantt view, and then configure the copy view. But for this article, we'll configure the existing tracking Gantt view.

Now we want to display the extra baseline1 you saved earlier. So in the right hand Tracking Gantt view right click anywhere in the white background, and choose Bar Styles. In the Bar Styles panel you'll see all the existing types of bars listed. Carefully scroll down this list and then click into the left hand end of the first empty row, under NAME. This is just a free text box, so type in "Baseline1" without the quotes.

Select the next cell under APPEARANCE and then in the lower part of the display choose a bar style, for example a solid bar, with a colour of your choice. Then move to the next cell SHOW FOR TASKS and choose Normal, so all tasks will be displayed. You can skip the ROW column, and move to the next cell under FROM. Carefully click the pop down and choose the field BASELINE1 START.

You can type a "B" and the drop down list will auto fit to all fields beginning with "B". Move to the last cell under TO and in the pop down choose BASELINE1 FINISH. Check you've made the correct selections and then click OK to complete. That's it. Now your Tracking Gantt should show both baselines.

The key action here is to choose the appropriate Baseline start and finish fields. So if you do create multiple baselines you now display them all on a Gantt chart, choosing the START and FINISH fields for BASELINE1, BASELINE2, BASELINE3 and so on. Once you've got the hang of this you could try variations in the display. For example you might like to show the slip between the plan START field and baseline START field, or the slip between BASELINE START and BASELINE1 START.

You could also use different bar styles for different display aspects, so, for example, you might use solid bars for baselines and thin coloured lines with or without a hash pattern for slip between baselines. If you find this useful, you could create a separate Gantt Chart view just for multiple baselines, so your original is not tool cluttered.

Interim Plans

Interim plans work in a similar way to baselines, but only save task start and finish data, not all project data in the underlying tables. So if you need to keep records of all plan changes, perhaps prior to final agreement with interested parties, then interim plans can be more effective as less extra data is stored within the project file.

Hopefully this article has given you a brief insight into how a Gantt chart can be easily configured to show additional baselines and interim plans. To learn more about the many features on Microsoft Project why not consider attending an instructor lead training course. This can be a really effective way to boost your learning.