Durations incorrect

[Steve C]

What would cause a duration in a brand new project to calculate differently
for two different users?

A co-worker of mine likes to open a new project, enter a task, then manually
enter a Start and Finish date just to see the duration between the two dates.
He recently entered a Start date of 1/15/07 and a Finish date of 4/16/07.
His program calculates the duration as 65.81 days, while my program
calculates it as 66 days.

What might be causing this discrepancy? Thanks.

 

[John]

What would cause a duration in a brand new project to calculate differently
for two different users?

A co-worker of mine likes to open a new project, enter a task, then manually
enter a Start and Finish date just to see the duration between the two dates.
He recently entered a Start date of 1/15/07 and a Finish date of 4/16/07.
His program calculates the duration as 65.81 days, while my program
calculates it as 66 days.

What might be causing this discrepancy? Thanks.

Steve,
First of all, does your do-worker realize that he is setting a
constraint on every task that he manually enters a start and/or finish
date? Manually entering dates for tasks is NOT the way to create a
schedule - it effectively defeats Project's scheduling engine.

Project calculates duration based on various settings. First, it depends
on the working time calendar. The standard default calendar has a first
shift of 8:00 am to 5:00 pm with a 1 hour break at noon. Second, the
number of hours in a day, week and month (used to calculate duration) is
set by Tools/Options/Calendar tab. And third, the default start and end
times for tasks (Tools/Options/Calendar tab) is also 8:00 am 5:00 pm. A
difference in any one of these between your installations of Project
will affect new project files that are created on either PC.

I would check all the above settings between your PC and your
co-worker's PC. One of them is probably different.

John
Project MVP

 

[Steve C]

Yes, he does realize he's setting constraints, but his purpose for entering
dates is strictly to have Project do a quick duration calculation, that's
all. He deletes the tasks afterwards and uses the program properly.

I will try your suggestions. Thanks.

 

[John]

Yes, he does realize he's setting constraints, but his purpose for entering
dates is strictly to have Project do a quick duration calculation, that's
all. He deletes the tasks afterwards and uses the program properly.

I will try your suggestions. Thanks.

Steve,
OK, that approach does work and it sounds like he understands what he is
doing.

John