Column Calculations

[pwooster]

Hello,

I need some help with a column calculation on project plan template.
The first column defines the category i.e. Painting the House. The
second column has times for individual tasks involved with painting the
house: scraping, priming, painting and clean up.

We assigned 25 hours for painting the house. We want to net the hours
from the 25 hours as each task is completed. For example, if team
member entered 5 hours for scraping. The total for painting the house
would 25 -5 = 20.

Any suggestions, direction or links to how to articles would be
appreciated.

 

[Andrew]

I assume that you have tried using summary/child tasks and that that
functionality isn't what you are looking for. If you haven't tried that, it
would be the first thing before messing with custom fields - to do that just
select the subtasks, and use the green arrow in the Standard toolbar to
indent.

If that's not the solution, then here's how I would do it:

1) Create a custom field for the category. In this case, I would probably
use Text1, and create a value list.
2) Assign the category to each task
3) Create a Custom Group on the new field (Project>Group By>Customize Group)
4) Add the following fields to your table: Work, Actual Work, Remaining Work

If you do that, the Grouping command will subtotal each of those fields for
each category. If I read your post right, that means that you will have a
subtotal of each task labeled "Paint the House."