# Sharing Resources Among Projects

With several projects on your plate at once, managing resources can be complicated if you try to manage them for each project separately. If you use some of your resources for different projects, Microsoft Project can help you simplify resource management by enabling you to share resources among projects. You do this by creating a resource pool, a project file containing information about a group of resources that several projects share in common.

By creating a resource pool, you can:

- Share resources among a number of projects.
- Add shared resources to a new project quickly.
- Easily review resource usage and costs across all projects without opening each individual project file.
- Identify and resolve conflicts that may result when resources are assigned to more than one project.
- Update the same piece of resource information — such as a resource rate, a resource calendar, or a resource cost — for all projects at once rather than one project at a time.
- Print resource reports that provide details about resource usage across projects.

When you create a resource pool, all the resource information that resides in the pool appears in each project file that shares the pool, because the resource pool is linked to the projects. Whenever you change information in the resource pool, such as a resource rate, you can transmit that change to all the linked projects. Likewise, if you update resource information in a project, you can transmit that change back to the resource pool.

By default, the information in the resource pool takes precedence, so resource information that’s already in the resource pool can’t be overwritten by information added later from projects that share the pool. You can, however, specify that the inserted project takes precedence.

You can share resources among projects whether or not you consolidate the projects. If you know in advance that a number of projects will share the same resources, you don’t need to enter those resources into each project individually. Instead, you can create a resource pool containing resource information only (no tasks or task information), and then have all related projects use this project’s resources. If, after creating several projects that include both tasks and resources, you realize that they have many resources in common, you can designate one project as the resource pool for all the projects.

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