Then we go back into the Format > Text Styles dialog box for our new view, and configure Highlighted Cells to appear red. We’ll call this view “_LOC Gantt Chart.” Once we’ve created this view, we need to create a custom filter: To fix this, we need to create a custom view. In our case above, what’s happening is that the Milestone formatting is overriding the formatting we set for Critical tasks. (Note that Project 2010 has the same options with the addition of Inactive Tasks at the bottom of the list.) As a general rule, the items at the bottom take precedence over the ones at the top. The trick is to review the list of text styles available in the Text Styles Dialog Box: Here we can see that the milestones are clearly flagged as critical – yet they’re not showing up with the red highlighting. Check out the following screenshot of a simple path with the Critical field displayed: From a Microsoft Project standpoint, milestones definitely can be critical. Huh? Some might say that milestones shouldn’t be critical, which is perhaps a religious argument I hope to avoid for now. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work for milestones. Sounds easy enough, right? Other planning software packages can achieve this with no sweat, right? In Microsoft Project, you simply go to Format > Text Styles, select Critical Tasks in the drop down and enable a red background: to make the background of the cells turn red. The challenge has been that one of my users wants to flag all critical tasks in a schedule by using conditional highlighting, i.e. This is a question which has come up a couple of times both at work and in the newsgroups over the past couple of weeks. I originally wrote it for Microsoft Project 2007, but it should be just as applicable to the 2010 version. I was looking through my LiveWriter queue this week, and realized that I had a couple of posts left over from the last several months that I never posted.

Ms project gantt chart not showing