CS Project

Printing a Project Schedule (Bar Chart) in CS Project is very similar to printing in other Office programs:

Click File > Print > Print or Preview

Or go to the Reports Toolbar.

But getting only the specific project information you want into your printout involves a little prep work before you hit the print button. Read on to see how to get the right information onto the page for yourself or other project stakeholders.

Go to REPORTS toolbar and check the following:

• Select the View required (View > Display Bar Chart) or…
• Review the Current Layout (Print Bar Chart or Bar Chart Options).
• Select the required ACTIVITY TABLE and columns.
• Check the Activity Table CONTENTS are as required (e.g. Open/Close or Filtering).
• Check the DATE SCALE and GRID LINE spacing (Start or Configuration toolbar).

Click the Print Setup icon from the Reports Toolbar, and select the correct Printer 

Click the Page Setup icon from the Reports Toolbar, and select the paper size you wish to print.

In the ‘Print Bar Chart’ dialog box you are able to print just the visible columns of the Activity Table.

The ‘From:’ and ‘To:’ dates can be left blank, this will then print from start to finish of a project.

If printing to a larger print size, it is advisable to add ‘Print Date at bottom’ of the chart.

The Page Setup Tab controls the size of paper being printed to, the orientation of the chart, and the scaling (compression) to fit onto pages.

Always set the required Paper Size before Preview.

CS Project offers 4 options for page format:

• Best Fit: will compress to a maximum of 50%, and automatically change number of pages and/or orientation to improve readability.
• Force-To-Pages: will compress chart to fit a specified number of pages (see note below).
• Multi-Page: uses no compression and will print Header & Footer on every page.
• Banner: similar to Multi-Page, but suppresses Headers & Footers.

Important Note: 

As ‘Force-To-Pages’ can compress the programme onto one page, it may become unreadable if too many tasks are to be printed on one page. We suggest that generally programmes should not be compressed any greater than 50%. Therefore check Paper Size, or select more pages.

Best Fit Option

This is the preferred default option, and will allow CS Project to Auto-select the optimum number of pages with correct Orientation to avoid the programme from being compressed below 50%. 

If ‘Best Fit’ prints over multiple pages, the Header and Footer will only be printed on the first and last pages. 

Should you wish to have Headers & Footers on all pages, select ‘Multi-Page’ and enter the same Compression Size as displayed in the Print Preview (or slightly less to allow for extra size of Headers).

If you prefer to have further control of pages, simply select the ‘Force-To-Pages’ option.

Force-To-Pages

This option will allow the user to specify the number of pages to print to a given Page Size (e.g. A3).

On first use, CS Project will offer a Best Fit Option for both Orientation & Layout.

To accept the Best Fit Suggestion, select Yes. If you do not wish to adopt the suggested page format, select No. 

If you do not wish to have further Best Fit Suggestions, select Cancel (see note).

Note: Should you wish to re-enable the Best Fit Suggestions when using Fit-To-Page.

Go to Start Toolbar > Preferences > General > untick the ‘Suppress Best Fit Layout Suggestions’.

With the rest the chart set to suit the paper size it remains to set the chart scale appropriate to the number of pages required. 

By considering the ideal Time Scale Units before printing, will greatly increase the quality of the printed chart, by reducing unnecessary compression.

Go to Start > Date Scale, or Configuration > Date Scale, or Print Preview > Scale

The width of the Bar Chart is controlled by the width of the smallest Grid Line Unit setting. Therefore if a project was 1 year long, and the Grid Line is set to 1 Day @ 5mm/day, then the overall with of the chart portion will be 1.8 metres.

So for longer projects, it is suggested that the Time Scaling is reduced to say every 7 days, or even Months. The above settings would equate to a chart width of around 400mm (A3 is 420mm).

The printed report can be enhanced by the use of the ‘Header’ and ‘Footer’ tabs.

Here is an example of a typical ‘Header’

 By clicking on the ‘Insert Field’ you can use fields from the CS Project data file, where:

• [CONAME] is Company Name (entered in Start > Preferences > Other)
• [PROJTITLE] is the Project Title (entered in Start > Project Details > Name)
• [VAR:Programme Title] is an additional text field (Configuration > Activity Variables)

Standard Border
On programmes with few activities, a useful setting is “Size Border to Report”.

This will raise the lower edge of the Chart just below the last entry instead at the bottom of the page.

In Print Preview, you can then click ‘Fit Rows’ to expand the depth to fill the page.

Note: The Fit Rows is only available on Fit-To-Page option.

Custom Borders

A custom border is a Windows Metafile (WMF file) that displays a border or frame inside which a report is displayed. 

• Fetch: press this button to select a Windows Metafile to use as a border. You may have installed some sample borders during installation. 
• Clear: clears the current border entry file. 
• Top/Left/Right/Bottom: specify the drawing area inside the frame as a percentage of the frame size. This is the area on which the actual report will be printed. 
• Fit to frame: estimates the drawing area inside the frame.

The efficiency of this operation depends on the drawing package that was used to produce the custom border and the drawing elements used to set it up. The algorithm determines the smallest open rectangular are around the centre of the page, but in this process only looks at vertical and horizontal lines or rectangles. Generally, if you surround the report area with a rectangle, this works well, as shown by the red frame in the 

following diagram.

Note:  There are sample Custom Borders installed in the following directory during the installation of CS Project.

C:\ProgramData\Crest Software\CS Project\Samples and Templates\Borders

You can also place special placeholders on your custom border. When the report is generated, these placeholders will be replaced by actual text or values from your project plan. The following placeholders are allowed:

• [%] – project percent complete 
• [ACOST] – actual cost of project 
• [ACTFILTER] – activity filter currently applied 
• [ACTSORT] – activity sorting currently applied 
• [ASGFILTER] – assignment filter currently applied 
• [BCOST] – baseline cost of project 
• [BFINISH] – baseline finish date of project 
• [BSTART] – baseline start date of project 
• [CONAME] – company name defined in Setup/Preferences 
• [COST] – scheduled cost of project 
• [DATE] – current date 
• [DUR] – project duration 
• [EVALUE] – earned value of project 
• [FINISH] – scheduled finish date of project 
• [ID] – project ID 
• [MP] – total number of pages in report 
• [NOTES] – project notes 
• [PG] – current page number in report 
• [PROJFILE] – name of project file 
• [PROJTITLE] – project title 
• [RESFILE] – name of resource file 
• [RESFILTER] – resource filter currently applied 
• [RESSORT] – resource sorting currently applied 
• [REV] – revision of project schedule 
• [START] – scheduled start date of project

In addition to this, all user-defined variables can be displayed as well, e.g. if you have a variables called Text1, the corresponding placeholder is called [VAR:Text1].