Like many project managers out there we often have tasks or sections of our project schedules that we want to hide or “remove” for what-if scenarios or to show our executive teams different scenarios. The new Inactive Task feature in Project Professional 2010 allows you to do this easily. And the best part is that it carries throughout the project schedule, meaning that if you have tasks (with or without actual hours), you can inactivate those tasks and see the result on the entire project (in the Gantt chart, in Resource Usage, and at the Project Summary level).

How might you use this?

First, consider scenario-based planning. Phases one through three and an optional phase four could all be contained in one project schedule. With Inactive tasks you can easily see the project totals for phases one through three and one through four. No need to create two separate project schedule (files) with this information.

Second, you could cancel or remove work that was scheduled and now is out of scope (You’ll also see that the summary task or task is inactive.)

You’ll see that the inactive tasks retain their task information (although inactive), including all estimates, task dependencies, and resource assignments. Note that the dates for the inactive tasks are in gray.

So how do you think it will handle baseline information Inactive tasks won’t change the baseline/variance information that was saved. This is good.

To do this, add in the Active Column and right-click on task (or summary task). Select Inactive.