Using links between projects

[Debbie in San Diego]

Does anyone use the link functionality between projects? If so, do you
experience problems in keeping the information consistent? If so, have you
figured out how to resolve it?

The situation that we have is that we have a high level project and several
lower level projects. We've taken various key tasks in the lower level
project and linked the start and finish dates in the high level project.
(doing a copy on the start date from the source project , paste special,
paste link on the start date field in the high level project and then
repeating on the finish date. We cannot link/copy the entire task into the
high level project as we're using only the start date of a series of tasks
and the end date of the ending tasks). What happens is frequently and
apparently randomly when opening the high level project, sometimes the linked
dates will have the correct dates and sometimes they are grossly wrong (going
out 5 or more years longer than is correct). HELP!!!

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Debbie --

Given your problem with paste links, have you thought about setting
cross-project dependencies instead? To do so, you would need to create a
master project consisiting of each of your projects as subprojects in the
master project. After creating the master project, you would need to expand
each of the subprojects, and then you can set links between tasks in
different projects. The beauty of this approach is that you don't really
need to save the master project. If you close it without saving it, you
will be prompted about saving project information in each of the
subprojects. Click the Yes to All button to save the cross-project
dependency information. I think this might present a more stable
environment for you between each of the projects. Hope this helps.

 

[Debbie in San Diego]

We have considered it, but there are a few reasons we're reluctant to go that
route:
1. Each subproject is around 2000 or 3000 lines. Putting 7-10 subprojects of
that size would make the master project be around 20,000 - 30,000 long.
Having something that size would be cumbersome to open, maneuver, etc., not
to mention the performance as far as how long it'd take to open, etc.

2. When we save a master project and then try to view it in Web Access, only
the summary line is shown. The details of the subproject do not show up in
the display.

3. We're not looking for every task in the subproject to show in master
project, more like summary information only.

thank you for the suggestion!