Project 2010 Ribbon and Timeline View

Project 2010 gets the Office Ribbon, a new Timeline View, and other improvements to help manage project schedules and resources. In this screen shot, the Project 2010 window shows the Office Ribbon at the top, the new timeline scheduling view below the Ribbon, and the normal Gantt chart view in the bottom pane.

The Ribbon, used with most Office products, is a context-sensitive display of command icons and galleries of command results to make frequently used commands more visible. In this screen shot, the Ribbon shows Gantt chart tools such as the manual schedule tool and formatting options.

Below the Ribbon is a new view—the Timeline View—with major project milestones that can be useful as a global summary of a project to help project managers focus on particular problem areas without getting lost in a huge display of tasks and dependencies. In this illustration, the development task is a different color to indicate that some adjustment may be needed, such as allocating more resources or rescheduling some subtasks; the Timeline View includes drill down to find the source of the problem at lower levels. Once the Timeline View is adjusted the way the user wants, it can be exported as Office art to other programs, such as PowerPoint, where Office themes (colors, fonts) can be applied.