Show used resources under specific topic?

My question is going into a different direction. See following picture:

How can I see how many resources are used under Topic A and under Topic B?

BTW...what are these small hollow circles (before Topic A and Topic B) for? I know how to hide them...but I do not know for what purpose they are for?

OK.

you can see where resources are used via the Mapindex pane look for resources

And you can set resources available time under the task ribbon > resources

Now resources are supposed to do something in a period in time. So you have to give start-enddates to the tasks. And then you can see how they are used in the gantt view (maybe only in GanttPro.)

The small hollow circles are used to drag the topic to a different location (only maintopics)

Once moved they turn black.

It is a visual aid available in many versions already.

I played already a little bit with with the Gantt chart.

I have added virtual start and end dates now.

Gantt chart is showing me the tasks of the resources...but without a link to the upper topic. I guess the comment from Nick is discribing exactly what I need (task rollup, but modified to be able to aggregate resources)...

Although it does not solve the original issue, note that you can create a line entry for the parent topic in the Gantt chart. Either apply task rollup to it, or select it and click Task > Make Summary. The latter will force it to be a summary in the Gantt chart without using task rollup, which is only useful in Work Breakdown Structure trees.

Hi Nick, I'm intrigued by this response. I can't seem to find a "Task>Make Summary" option anywhere. I can see how you achieve the same outcome by with Edit Task>Milestone, but your approach suggests something else.

Hello Alex

The "Make Summary" button should be in the Advanced Scheduling group in the Task tab. It creates a summary in the Gantt chart without using task roll-up. Task rollup requires tasks to be the leaf nodes of trees, which is not always the case - tasks can be subtopics of other tasks unless or until you apply task rollup. With this feature a topic can be both a task and its own summary of the tasks in the tree underneath it. This summary appears only in the Gantt chart and does not create task info on the topic.

Thanks Nick - shows how often I use Gantt charts - or Advanced Scheduling, for that matter...

Thanks for your reply. Bad for me...I was hoping that maybe a workaround is existing for this. Can I switch this thread into an "idea" instead of a "question" or do I have write a new entry into this forum?

A new entry under "Ideas" is probably cleaner because this thread now contains other issues.

There is a workaround of sorts but it’s probably not viable unless you have, say, only around five or six resources. You could set up a topic property for each resource and then use a set of SmartRules to write a “1” in the topic property of each task if that particular resource is used on that task. You could then use a formula to sum these properties within each task topic and/or at the parent/main topic level.