This page covers how to read the screen: what the list on the left tells you, and what the bars on the right mean.
The project list
Your projects sit one per row, with milestones indented underneath them and tasks indented under the milestones. Each level is indented a little further, so you can tell at a glance whether you are looking at a project, a phase or a single task. Tasks that belong to a project but not to any milestone sit directly under the project.
At the top of the list:
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The search box stays in place while you scroll. Type part of a project title and the list narrows as you go.
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The collapse button next to it opens or closes every project and milestone at once. Useful for getting back to a clean overview after digging into the detail.
You can also click a single project or milestone to open just that one.
The columns are yours to choose. See the toolbar. Hovering a value tells you which column it belongs to, which helps when you have narrowed the columns down.
What search does and does not do
Search matches project titles. It does not look at milestone names, task names, customers or descriptions, so searching for a task will find nothing even when that task is on screen. Milestones and tasks appear because their project matched, not because they matched themselves.
Use search when you know roughly what a project is called. Use the filters when you want a group of projects: by type, status, customer or team.
Search is remembered, like the rest of your setup. Leave text in the box, close the view and come back tomorrow, and the list is still narrowed. If projects you expect to see are missing, the search box is the first place to look.
The bars
Every row in the list has a bar on the right, drawn from its start date to its deadline. The bars nest the same way the list does: a project bar spans all its milestones, and a milestone bar spans the tasks inside it. That nesting is the quickest way to spot a phase that has drifted outside the project it belongs to.
The colour of a bar comes from the underlying project, specifically the colour set on its status or its type. A project with no colour of its own falls back to blue.
Today
A dashed vertical line runs down the whole view at today's date. Anything to the left of the line should be finished.
Work that runs off the edge
When a project starts before your period or ends after it, its bar is cut off at the edge of the view and marked. Without that marking you would see a bar stopping neatly at the end of March and conclude the work stops there too.
Hovering a bar
Hold the mouse over a bar to see its start date and deadline. If your Microbizz is set up for it, the tooltip can be configured to show more.
Reading capacity
Once every project is on one timeline, three things become readable without doing any arithmetic:
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Empty space in a period is free capacity, so there is room to say yes to something new.
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Bars stacking up in the same weeks is a period under pressure. Whether it is genuinely too much depends on who is available, but the view tells you where to look.
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A red extension on a project bar means something underneath it now runs past the project's own deadline.
Bar colours reflect status or type rather than how busy a period is. See Good to know.
Right-clicking
Most of what you can do from this screen lives in the right-click menu, and what you get depends on what you click:
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A project: open it, add a milestone, add a task, or manage its dependencies.
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A milestone: edit or delete it, add a task, or manage its dependencies.
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A task: open it, or remove it from its milestone.
Open project and Open task take you out of Project Overview to the item's own screen, where the full detail lives.
Next: 4. Milestones and tasks