Hi MG,
Sorry for jumping in here but it's possible Gérard is off line currently.
I think there are a couple of points about Project that may be causing some
confusion for you. Duration in Project is always the span of time from the
start date of the task to the finish date of the task in working time units
(Days, Weeks, Months). What days are working days (every Monday through
Friday -- no holidays, or every day Sunday through Saturday) is defined in
the project calendar. By default, the project calendar is the "Standard"
calendar which defines every Monday through Friday as working days from 8:00
am to 12:00 pm and 1:00 pm to 5:00 pm. All Saturdays and Sundays are
non-working. The working time units (Days, Weeks, Months) is defined in
Tools > Options on the calendar tab.
When you say a task is 3 months long -- the default definition of a month in
Project is 20 working days. So when you enter a task starting on 1 Jan 2007
with the default definitons in place, the task's scheduled finish is 23 March
2007 -- or 60 working days later. To have a task start on 1 Jan 2007 and end
on 30 March 2007 (31 March is a Saturday), you would need to enter 3.25mo
duration.
In earlier posts, you were attempting to use elapsed months. A word of
caution, assigning a resource to a 3 elapsed month duration task will
schedule the resource to work 24 hours per day, 7 days per week.
As you are new to Project, I suggest taking a look at Mike Glen's excellent
series of on-line articles about MS Project at:
http://project.mvps.org/mike's_tutorials.htm
I hope this helps. Let us know how you get along.
Julie
MG said:
Gerard,
Thank you for the response. Unfortunately I have just started using Project
and know very little about it. I created a custom field column and entered
the formula as you wrote it, but it did not work.
Maybe the better question is, is it possible to enter a duration of say 3
months starting January 1, and have the task run from January 1 through March
31 and have the Task and Subtask show a duration of 3 months?
Thank you,
Mark
Gérard Ducouret said:
Hi Mark,
You'll have to insert a custom field wtih a formula such as :
DateDiff("m";[Start];[Finish])
Gérard Ducouret
MG said:
I am putting together a preliminary development schedule and at this point,
every task is in elapsed months.
The subtasks are in elapsed months but the main task is in actual months.
Is there a way to have the main task show the duration in elapsed months as
well?
Thank you,
Mark
