Tips and Tricks: Tweak the Timescale

You may not be able to speed up time in your project, but you can speed up the timescale-that is, how you use the timescale in views like the Gantt chart. If you've spent any time in Project, you may have wasted a lot of effort either scrolling the timescale or changing its time units. Fiddling with dialog boxes and scroll bars to get the timescale perfect gets old in a hurry.

Fortunately, there are a few keyboard shortcuts that will dramatically speed up your timescale tweaking.

Here is a list of my favorites:

Scroll the timescale left or right              

ALT  +  LEFT ARROW (or RIGHT ARROW)

Show smaller time units on the timescale

CTRL +  / (slash on the numeric keypad)

Show larger time units on the timescale

CTRL + * (asterisk on the numeric keypad)

Scroll to a task's Gantt bar

CTRL + SHIFT + F5

. . . And if you like these tips, let us know in the Comments section. We'll start posting more of them.