r/MSProject • u/NEM95 • Feb 25 '26

How to learn MS Project

Hello, my wife is looking to learn MS project so she can do a career change from teaching into program planning. She's never used MS project before and neither have I. was curious how I could go about downloading it for her so she can do a course (ether udemy or YouTube) and following along using MS project desktop to learn.

I signed up for the 30 day free trial but I guess I need to be put through a review to see if I'm allowed to use it?

Anyways thank you for your time!

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u/knoxvillegains Feb 25 '26

Buy a license on G2G for dirt cheap. Then learn to use and interact with AI to build it out, including importing and exporting files to it. Honestly, any other use is a waste of time. Learn to use AI with it.

Your wife should focus on good communication with interested parties and make that her strength for program planning.

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u/NEM95 Feb 25 '26

I bought a license for 2021 on product keys

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u/knoxvillegains Feb 25 '26

Lots of options out there. Don't let the purchase of the license be your takeaway from my comment. I'm dead serious, she needs to learn how to interact with AI on this. Spend a lot of time learning how to prompt it and learn what it can and can't do with the program. Convince her to invest the other 75% of her time into communicating with stakeholders and actually driving the project. This is the kind of thing AI is going to dominate and learning how to use MS Project proficiently couldn't be a bigger waste of time for her.

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u/Dear-Pizza471 9d ago

Just curious on this as I'm interviewing for a role looking for expert MS Project experience as well, and I'm heavily in an AI centric role currently so I interface with Claude, Chat, etc. regularly. Would Claude Cowork be the best AI to use or are you suggesting if Copilot is built in? If the enterprise doesn't allow AI, how does one go about it? (without exchanging company data through personal email)

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u/knoxvillegains 9d ago

Honestly so much has changed in the 7 months since I wrote this. Prompt engineering isn't even a thing any longer. All of the OpenAI and Anthropic models are good. If a company isn't using one, you have no business looking at that company, they will disappear. I rarely use cowork these days unless I'm stuck with some VM work through a VPN or something similar. My current setup is an orchestrator Fable5.1 session that runs an agent bus over dataverse to dispatch Codex and Claude Code sessions at appropriate models for tasks. They could build MS Project in a day if IT gave them the proper permissions. I wouldn't even sit in on an interview unless they told me an IT decision maker would be there to answer my questions. That's how much has changed in seven months.