Editing the Work Breakdown Structure

The Work Breakdown Structure Editor and the Common Workflows Editor both display a hierarchical collection of WBS items in an outline format. You can edit this outline using both the mouse and the keyboard, in a manner that will feel familiar to users of Microsoft PowerPoint or Microsoft Word. This section explains many of the editing features that are available for editing the hierarchical WBS.

• To select an item in the WBS, just click on the name of the item. You can click and drag to select an entire range of WBS items. Once an item is selected, you can use the Up, Down, PgUp, and PgDn keys to select a different WBS item.
• To create a new entry in the WBS, press Enter or Insert. Pressing Enter will create a new item below the currently highlighted WBS item; pressing Insert will insert the new line before the currently highlighted WBS item. These features are also provided on the Edit menu as the Insert After and Insert options, and on the toolbar via the Add New Row () button.

  Note: during the initial launch, you will be creating many new tasks. For this reason, the Enter key is configured to create a new row - just like hitting Enter in a word processor would create a new paragraph. After the launch is complete, it will be less common to create new tasks, and you may find yourself hitting Enter and inserting tasks by mistake. To fix this, a toggle button () is provided on the toolbar. Clicking this icon will toggle the behavior of the Enter key between "create a new row" (word-processor-like behavior) and "move to the next line" (spreadsheet-like behavior). When you have the "new row" behavior toggled off, you can still create a new row from the keyboard by typing Ctrl-Enter.

• To edit the name of a WBS item, just click on the name of the item. A blinking cursor will appear, allowing you to edit the WBS item name.
• To delete the currently selected WBS item(s), click the trash can button on the toolbar () or select Delete from the Edit Menu.
• The items are displayed in outline format; this means that you can control their hierarchical arrangement by changing their indentation. Press the Tab key to indent the currently selected WBS item(s) to the right. Press the Shift-Tab key to un-indent the currently selected WBS item(s) to the left. You can also use the promote () and demote () buttons (on the toolbar and in the Edit menu) to accomplish this task.
• When a WBS item has children (that is, when other items are indented underneath it), a small plus () or minus () icon will appear to the left of the WBS item. You can click on this plus/minus icon to hierarchically expand and collapse that WBS item. The toolbar also provides expand (), collapse (), expand all (), and collapse all () buttons for convenience.
• Cut / Copy / Paste operations are provided for rearranging the WBS. Highlight one or more WBS items and click the copy button on the toolbar () to copy them to the clipboard. Select the desired destination and click the paste button on the toolbar (). To move items instead of copying them, use the cut button () instead of the copy button.

  Note: If you find yourself repeatedly copying and pasting some particular group of WBS items, you may be able to save time by defining a common workflow instead.

• To rearrange the order of two adjacent items, use the Move Up and Move Down buttons on the toolbar. The move up button () will cause a WBS item to exchange places with its previous sibling. If the item being moved has hierarchical children, they will be moved as well. The move down button () will cause a WBS item to exchange places with the sibling that follows. (Note that these operations could also be accomplished with Copy and Paste, but for the specific task of rearranging items, move up and move down can be more convenient.)
• Each WBS item is represented by an icon to the left of the item name. This icon indicates whether the item is a software component, document, or task. Rectangular icons () are used to indicate tasks that were created by the application of a workflow, while parallelograms () are used to indicate ad-hoc tasks that were manually added to the WBS. If you hover the mouse pointer over an icon, a tool tip will display the name of the item type depicted by the icon. For example, hovering over a WBS item with the floppy disk icon () would display a tool tip that reads "Software Component." To change the type of a WBS item, click on the icon to display a menu of options. You can also open this menu using your keyboard by pressing the "context menu" key, or by typing Alt-Enter.

• Once your project has begun and individuals start collecting data, the WBS will be able to tell which tasks and components have been marked complete. It will show this visually by drawing a strikethrough line on the name of any WBS element that is 100% complete. For tasks that have been assigned to more than one individual, strikethrough will be used in the "Assigned To" column to indicate which individuals have marked the tasks complete. These visual cues can help as you rebalance remaining work.
• You can insert a list of tasks into the WBS by copying and pasting task names from another program such as Excel or Word. Arrange the task names in a vertical column in Excel (or place one task name on each line in Word), and copy the names to the clipboard. Then, highlight a row in the WBS, and click the paste button on the toolbar (). The tasks will be inserted before the selected row.
• To quickly find a particular item in the Work Breakdown Structure, click the find () button on the toolbar. Enter a word or phrase and click the next/previous buttons to search. You can also click the "Replace" tab on this dialog to replace matches with alternative text.
• To make the text in the WBS Editor window larger or smaller, click the zoom () button on the toolbar.
• If the currently selected item has an associated URL (for example, because you've entered a URL in the "Notes" column), you can click the external link () button on the toolbar to open that URL in a web browser.
• If you wish to find a all of the items that match a particular set of criteria, click the filter () button on the toolbar. In the window that appears, specify the criteria that you are interested in and click the Apply Filter button. The filter button will "light up" to indicate that a filter is in effect (), and the WBS Editor will hide items that do not match your criteria. Notes:
  • When a filter is in effect, columns sums update to respect the filter. For example, when the "Time" column displays the total time for the project or for a particular subcomponent, the displayed totals will only include time from the visible children that matched the filter.
  • In the name, milestones, and notes fields, you can enter multiple values separated by the vertical bar (|) character, and it will find items that match any of those values.
  • In the labels field, you can enter multiple labels separated by commas, and it will find items that have any of those labels.
  • If a particular item matches, the WBS Editor will display all of its parents and children as well.
  • If you enter multiple criteria, they all must match. However, these matches can occur at different levels of the hierarchy; so for example, you could search for incomplete tasks underneath a component whose name contained a particular word.
  • Although nonmatching items are hidden from view, the WBS Editor will not automatically expand the items that do match. If you would like to see all of the matches, highlight the root of the project and click the Expand All icon on the toolbar.
  • Nonmatching items are hidden from view and are shielded from editing operations. For example, if you edit the top-down time estimate for an entire component, this will only scale the times for the matching tasks underneath that component. Tasks that were hidden by the filter will not be modified.
  • While the filter is in effect, you will not be able to edit the hierarchical structure of the WBS. For example, you will not be able to insert, delete, or move any components or tasks. If you need to make these types of changes, you will need to remove the filter first.
• The Work Breakdown Structure Editor provides extensive undo and redo support via the undo () and redo () buttons on the toolbar. This undo/redo not only encompasses structural changes made to the hierarchical WBS in the left-hand side of the screen, but also includes metrics changes made in the tabs on the right-hand side of the screen.
• To save changes, press the save () button on the toolbar. If you ever doubt the changes you've made to the WBS, you can safely discard those changes by exiting without saving.
• If your team is using cloud storage for team data, make sure your cloud provider's sync client is running and active while editing the WBS. Your WBS changes will not be fully saved until the sync client reports that all files are published and up-to-date.

All of the features above are designed to make editing the WBS easy and fast, so you can create a useful plan during your team project launch. However, you should take additional care when editing the WBS after the project has begun. For more information, see the help topic on editing the WBS after project launch.