Note: Summary Tasks and Analyse Timescaled Data to EXCEL

[Trevor Rabey]

There are lots of good arguments for doing resourcing, costing and
predecessor linking at the Task level and avoiding doing any of them at the
Summaries level. Here is another one.
MSP allows a lot of things which turn out to be bad ideas.
Just because someting can be done doesn't mean it should be done.
It often takes a bit of getting burnt to discover the distinction between
best and worst practices.

I have previously thought that assigning Fixed Costs to Summaries was a good
idea or at least OK or convenient, but it's not.
Summary Fixed Costs don't get exported to EXCEL when you export the
Cumulative Cost data using Analyse Timescaled Data to EXCEL.

Trevor

 

[John]

There are lots of good arguments for doing resourcing, costing and
predecessor linking at the Task level and avoiding doing any of them at the
Summaries level. Here is another one.
MSP allows a lot of things which turn out to be bad ideas.
Just because someting can be done doesn't mean it should be done.
It often takes a bit of getting burnt to discover the distinction between
best and worst practices.

I have previously thought that assigning Fixed Costs to Summaries was a good
idea or at least OK or convenient, but it's not.
Summary Fixed Costs don't get exported to EXCEL when you export the
Cumulative Cost data using Analyse Timescaled Data to EXCEL.

Trevor

Trevor,
For whatever reason, the "analyze timescale data in Excel" utility does
not export ANY summary data. I guess the developers of that utility
didn't think it important to include summary data in the export. Perhaps
they felt that summary data could be re-created by the user in Excel if
necessary. Of course that theory falls apart if summary lines contain
their own "independent" data, as you note.

John
Project MVP