Build Team from Enterprise Dialog Box undocumented feature??

R

Roger C.

It appears that the "Available to Work" filter presumes that all work occurs
in a given calendar year. If I want to limit my choice of resources to those
available to work in a period between, say, December 20, 2004, and January 7,
2005, I get an error message that says, "Invalid date The starting date must
precede the finishing date."

I haven't been able to find any information about this limitation in the
usual sources. Does anyone know anything about this?

I am using MS Project Pro 2003 (11.1.2004.1707.15) SP1.
 
R

Roger C.

Well, I changed my date format from m/d to m/d/yyyy and it worked. But it
seems to me that a date is a date regardless of the format in which it is
displayed. Still seems buggy to me.

R.
 
R

Roger C.

Whether or not I choose to /display/ a year doesn't mean that I'm working a
project in a jumble of time. I know perfectly well that January follows
December, but Project apparently doesn't. And for projects of a short
duration, I would think that it would be perfectly legitimate to eliminate
displaying the year to get the most out of my computer monitor and printer
paper.

Try it yourself: Create a project that spans the new year, say from November
1, 2004 to January 31, 2005. In Tools->Options->View, change the date format
to "Jan 28" or "1/28". Now try to build a team from enterprise, and apply
the Available-to-work filter. All you have to do is click in the first date
and you get the error. The drop-downs on those fields give you what looks
like a full-fledged calendar, year and all, but as soon as you choose a date,
it drops the year.

At least this is the way it works on my copy of Professional.

Change the date display format to something that includes a year and it
works.

It appears that the dialog box picks up the format from the global options,
but loses the year in the process. It's been a while since I was a
programmer, but it seems that it's not using a system date at this point.
Handling date formats was a problem that I thought was licked a long time
ago.

It's not a function that I would use often, but there might be times when I
am specifically looking for a resource who has capacity to work during from
the end of December to January. I have found the work-around, but it's still
broken code.

Roger C.
Cincinnati
 
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