I think you're confusing baseline, scheduled, and actual dates - there are
three distinct sets of dates, not two. If I have a task in my task list it
will be scheduled to start and finish on certain dates. Those are the dates
that you see in the Start and Finish columns in the basic Gantt chart table
and if you are using Project properly you have let it calculate those dates
for you based on the project start date and the links/durations of the tasks
leading up to the one in question. Initially both the Baseline start/finish
and the Actual start/finish will be NA. When you are reasy to start work on
the project you need to have a record of your starting point so as things
progress you'll know where you stand. So you save a baseline. That copies
the Scheduled start/finish fields into the Baseline start/finish fields.
Now imagine a predecessor task earlier in your project takes longer than
you'd expected it to, but you still haven't begun to work on the task in
question. That increased duration of the earlier task will push the task in
question out later than we'd originally planned. The Scheduled start/finish
changes to reflect the new reality. But the Baseline start/finish retains
the original dates so we have something to compare to. Now we begin work on
the task, but we start a day later than the new schedule called for for some
reason. We post it is 10% done, lets say and enter an Actual start using
the tracking table in the Gantt chart. When we enter the Actual start date,
Project automatically also updates the Scheduled start date to be equal so
that the Scheduled finish will push forward a day, again reflecting reality.
Now the Baseline start/finish holds the dates we thought we'd have, the
Scheduled start and the Actual start show the date we actually began, the
Scheduled finish shows the date we expect to finish, and the Actual finish
shows NA because we haven't got there yet. See how it works?
--
Steve House
MS Project MVP
Visit
http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm for the FAQs
Becky said:
At the beginning of a project the planned dates are known but the actuals
aren't. I can se the baseline to NA but i cannot set the actuals to NA. 1. I
don't understand why they would se tit up this way. Does anyone know the
answer to my problem? Is there a way of blanking out the actual dates until
they actually happen?