Overview
When your MS Project data is too complex to fit on a single slide or you wish to showcase some of your tasks and milestones on separate (focused) timelines, you can easily split your Project plan across multiple slides with Office Timeline. Here’s how it works:
Steps
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Import all the tasks and milestones you’ll need from MS Project into PowerPoint using the Office Timeline add-in.
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Customize the resulting timeline as you wish (we’ll call it the High-Level timeline), and then duplicate the entire slide. Just right-click its corresponding thumbnail on the left side of the screen and select “Duplicate Slide” from the menu that pops up.
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The duplicate slide will become one of your “Focused” timelines. Here is where you’ll keep the first set of data you want to showcase. With this new slide selected, click Edit Data on the Office Timeline ribbon.
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From the Edit Data window, delete all items you don’t need on this Focused timeline. In our example, we’ll keep just some of the timescale milestones and the “Plan” swimlane.
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Once done, go back to your High-Level timeline, duplicate the slide again to create your second Focused timeline, and delete all items you don’t need here. Repeat until you finish splitting all your Project data across multiple slides. Here’s what our plan looks like broken up into separate visuals:
Quick tip:
Since all of the Focused timelines were created by duplicating the High-Level slide imported from Project, they’ll all remain linked to your original .mpp file. This means that you can update them all effortlessly whenever your MS Project data changes. For each of your slides, just click Refresh data on the Office Timeline ribbon and follow the simple Refresh steps to quickly update your PowerPoint timelines.
