Understand and Control Project Schedules
Project 2007 helps you effectively track and analyze projects with a better understanding of the schedule and impact of changes, while also allowing you to benefit from better financial control and richer analytics. This application now offers the ability to quickly determine factors that are affecting task dates and easily trace the source of issues. Specifically, improved Task Drivers help you determine the factor (such as task dependency, calendar constraints, schedule date, or vacation time) driving the start date of the task, so you can follow a chain of factors back to find the root cause of a particular delay. Project 2007 also automatically highlights all items that shift as a result of the most recent change you make. You can even undo actions or sets of actions from macros, and that allows you to test several "what-if" scenarios in order to fully understand the implications of each choice while making scope alterations.

Effectively Communicate and Present Project Information
Project Standard 2007 offers scheduling power and enhanced capabilities that can help improve the organization of your projects. Easily report and communicate information in various formats according to the needs of stakeholders. New leverage charts and diagrams will capture attention, thanks to the Visual Reports feature, which uses Excel and Visio Professional to produce PivotTable views, charts, graphs, and diagrams based on Project data. You can also enjoy the option of changing the background color of a cell or row with Background Cell Highlighting. Shade cells, similar to how you can in Excel, in order to convey additional meaning. In addition, any user can easily define custom report templates and share these with other Project users.

Flexible Project Tracking
Project 2007 delivers flexible project tracking and analysis by helping you to compute and track core metrics unique to your project by defining custom fields based on your formulas. And to help keep you on track, graphical indicators can alert you when specific conditions are met.

Improved Views and Sharing
With new enhancements to the Calendar interface and the addition of 3-D Gantt bars, Project 2007 lets you create even more visually effective reports. When it's time to share them, use Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services workspaces (requires Microsoft Windows Server 2003 or later), which are integrated into the Tasks pane of the Project Guide, a step-by-step, interactive aid that helps you set up projects, manage tasks and resources, track status, and report project information. This helps you better organize work and people to help ensure projects are delivered on time and within budget.

Easily Control Finances
Project 2007 features a budget field that lets you assign budgets to projects and programs. The new "Cost" resource type improves cost estimation and tracking, thanks to enhancements like more predefined fields, such as cost code, that map to financial fields tracked in project accounting systems.