HELP with Task Duration/Calendar !!!

[grace]

I am having trouble in Project scheduling task durations. I want the task
durations to run on actual calendar dates, not work days. If i have a project
that will be done 10 days from today, I want the finish date to be 10/25/08
not 10/28/08. I tried changing Saturday and Sundays to work days, but that
doesn't do it either.

HELP please!!!

 

[Darrell]

Grace,

You may want to re-trace your steps in making Saturday and Sunday working
days. If you added them correctly your task example should end on Friday the
24th.

Darrell

 

[John]

I am having trouble in Project scheduling task durations. I want the task
durations to run on actual calendar dates, not work days. If i have a project
that will be done 10 days from today, I want the finish date to be 10/25/08
not 10/28/08. I tried changing Saturday and Sundays to work days, but that
doesn't do it either.

HELP please!!!

Grace,
How exactly did you make Saturday and Sunday both work days? If done
correctly, you will get the result you want.

The easiest way to create a 7 day workweek is to go to Tools/Change
Working time and in the "For" selection box at the top of the Change
Working TIme window, select the "7 day calendar".

Now when you create tasks, the duration entered in days will be in terms
of the project calendar working days, which is now 7.

Depending on what else you may want to do with durations (e.g. express
in weeks or months) you may need to change the default definition for
those under Tools/Options/Calendar tab.

Hope this helps.
John
Project MVP

 

[Jim Aksel]

Key durations as "edays" for Elapsed days. Generally you can put an "e" in
front of any unit of measure. Caution: This reverts to essentially a 24
hour calendar. If a task is entered as 8 ehours and it follows a task that
finishes at 2:00PM the "8 ehr" task will finish at 10:00 PM, regardless of
work hours. Weekends are not respected either ... they become clock hours.

I would use a 7 day work calendar instead like you first tried.

Project 2003: Tools/Change Working Time... Select the columns for
Saturday/Sunday. Select "Non Default Working Time" and then click OK.

Project has 4 calendar items to consider. I copied this from help:

Base Calendar: A base calendar is used as a template that the project
calendar (project calendar: The base calendar used by a project.), resource
calendars (resource calendar: A calendar that specifies working and
nonworking time for an individual resource. A resource calendar differs from
a base calendar, which specifies working and nonworking time for more than
one resource.), or task calendars (task calendar: The base calendar that you
can apply to individual tasks to control their scheduling, usually
independent of the project calendar or any assigned resources' calendars. By
default, all tasks use the project calendar.) are based on.

So, changes to your standard calendar will also change the resource work
calendars. However, resource calendars can be personalized to reflect
vacation,etc. Look there for issues too.

*********
P2007: Generally the same rules apply. However, with P2007 you need to
establish "Exceptions." Tools/Change Working Time... Click in the
Exceptions area and name yourself an exception: "Work Weekends", click on the
date cell. Click Details. Click the "Working Times" radio button.
Recurrance pattern is "Weekly", select Saturday and Sunday. range of
recurrance can be set as you wish ... I just did it for 10/15/2008 through
12/31/2008 and it worked fine.
--
If this post was helpful, please consider rating it.

Jim Aksel, MVP

Check out my blog for more information:
http://www.msprojectblog.com

 

[Mike Glen]

Hi Grace,

Welcome to this Microsoft Project newsgroup

Durations are always a function of working days, so just enter the number of
working days you want (8 days in your example) and it will end at 1700hrs
on Friday - the last working day. If you want to work over the weekends,
use Tools/Change working time... and amend the project calendar to make
Sat/Sun working time. You could also enter elapsed time, eg 11ed. You
could also select the 24hrs calendar, but if you assign any resources they
will be working 24/7.

FAQs, companion products and other useful Project information can be seen at
this web address: http://project.mvps.org/faqs.htm

Hope this helps - please let us know how you get on

Mike Glen
MS Project MVP
See http://tinyurl.com/2xbhc for my free Project Tutorials

 

[Steve House [MVP]]

Why do you need to do that? Projects are driven forward by resources doing
work. Whenever the resources are not working, progress on the project
stops. So if you say "it will take 10 days to finish this activity," that
really has to mean 10 working days. If the resources work 7 days a week, it
will be 10 calendar days. But if the resource only comes to work 1 day a
week, the required 10 days worth of activity will take 10 calendar weeks
before it's done! It kind of sounds like you're trying to get Project to
display dates that fit into a preconceived idea of what the project schedule
'ought' to be. Try to avoid that temptation. Project is designed to help
you discover the optimum schedule, not simply document a plan that you
already have in mind.

For what it's worth, Project doesn't really use normal, everyday, civil
calendar days, weeks, or months of any stripe at all. It really stores and
calculates all durations (and other times) in minutes to the nearest tenth.
If you enter a task showing 3 days duration (with all the settings at their
defaults), Project calculates 3 days x 8 hours per day x 60.0 minutes per
hour and the resulting value of 1440.0 minutes is the actual task duration.
Then when it schedules the task's start and end dates it looks at the
working time calendar (Tools/ChangeWorkingTime) to see which minutes out of
the days and weeks count to 'burn up' duration minutes and which minutes
don't count. If the workday is 8 to 5 and the task starts at 8am, duration
starts burning at 8am when the resource starts working, stops at noon for
lunch hour, resumes at 1pm, and stops again at 5pm when the resource leaves
for the day for 480.0 minutes burned up. Then the duration clock stops
until the resource comes back to work the next day at 8am, at which time the
duration clock starts running again. It continues likes this like a
stopwatch, ticking away when the resource is there and stopping whenver he
leaves, until 1440.0 minutes has been used up.

HTH