Odd effect of Project Start Date

[Martin Wilkinson]

Running P2000.

Could someone explain how Project uses the Project Start Date? I have a
fixed milestone task, yet when I change the Project Start Date, the date of
the milestone changes.
Is this expected behaviour - does Project convert a fixed task date to an
offset from the Project Start Date, and retain that offset when the Project
Start Date is changed? Seems a bit odd - if I fix a date I would expect it to
remain fixed.

This can be proved easily by creating a single task in a new project,
setting it as a milestone and then changing the Project Start Date.

The details of my situation are as follows:

Project start date: 20 May 05
Milestone Task: date 1 Nov 05. Start no earlier,fixed units,effort driven,
no calendar, mark task as milestone ticked, duration 0 days (not Estimated).

If I change the Project start date to 1 Apr 06, the milestone date changes
to 13 Sep 06. This is approximately the same offset from the Project start
date (5.5 months).


Thanks for any tips

Martin

 

[Martin Wilkinson]

Just noticed that if I change the Project Start Date from the menu
"Project/Project Information..", I don't get the behaviour below. The
behaviour below occurs only when using "Adjust Dates" button on the Analysis
toolbar. I thought they were equivalent, but obviously not.

So I guess the question is, how does changing the Project Start Date from
"Project/Project Information..", differ from changing it via the toolbar? The
plot thickens!

 

[Martin Wilkinson]

Apologies for posting this thread - I've just found out from previous posts
(now my PC is working again) that the Adjust Dates macro does something
different (and additional to) changing the Project Start Date via
Project/Project Information.

Martin