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MS Project questions

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kalos:
guys, I have that MS Gantt chart....
and I specify a start date 18/05/2015
then I specify 1wk as duration
and it fills automatically 28/05/2015!
and I correct it manually to 22/05/2015
and it automatically makes the 1wk to 0.3wk!!
and whatever I correct, I cannot fix it!
isn't this a badly designed program?

IainB:
guys, I have that MS Gantt chart....
and I specify a start date 18/05/2015
then I specify 1wk as duration
and it fills automatically 28/05/2015!
and I correct it manually to 22/05/2015
and it automatically makes the 1wk to 0.3wk!!
and whatever I correct, I cannot fix it!
isn't this a badly designed program?
____________________________
-kalos (May 22, 2015, 09:42 AM)
--- End quote ---

It can be very frustrating when that sort of thing happens in MS Project.
I did a DuckGo search of "Problem - MS Project automatically resets a task duration" and came up with lots of potentially useful Q&As in forum discussions - e,g,, Problems with dates and duration time with project professional 2010 - Microsoft Community

Without wishing to labour the point, the investment of your time in a training course in the use of MSP, or (probably better) a simultaneous study of MS Project and the book MS Project Inside Out, could help to give you a clearer perspective on this sort of issue - including, for example, why whatever default settings - or (say) settings that you may have fixed -  for your resource availability is a constraint that MS Project will try to match.
If the match is infeasible - e.g., (say) the changed task duration cannot meet the fixed constraints as set - then MSP will readjust until it does meet them. I don't know, but that might be what happened in your case (above).

NB: Also check things like, for example:

* (a) that you have made consistent use of units of any resource's time.
* (b) whether your manual correction effectively changed the default unit of resource, or the default resources required. (Check all aspects/properties of the status of the resource before and after the change that you make, and before/after MSP makes its changes.)
* (c) whether there are any peculiar Calendar constraints for the resources involved, for that time period.
* (d) whether that task is on the critical path - depending on how you have set up the project, MSP may try to adjust things to stay within the critical path constraints according to the overall START and END points set for the project.
MS Project is arguably one of the most comprehensive and best-designed project planning tools for both CPA (Critical Path Analysis) and Network (PERT) analysis, and project costing that are currently available in the market.
It is actually a sophisticated database tool. I'm not sure, but I think that at one time in its product life it may have been based on Access.
The latest incarnation (I don't know which version you are using) would be the result of years of progressive and incremental improvement and redevelopment throughout its product life.

Many MSP users seem to be unaware that, for many years, MS project has also had a feature for corporate users, which enable one to have a central repository (server) for plans for large and complex programmes of work, where individual sub-project plans can be signed out and worked on in isolation by that sub-project's manager, and then checked back in to the central repository. The overall programme plan thus gives a fully-integrated picture and can use a common pool of resources which tie in to the HR resource utilisation (Calendar, holidays, available working hours, and timesheets) in the corporation. This enables any project manager to access a common resource pool. With a bit of thought, the beneficial implications of this for resource management and resource costing can be appreciated. For example, including how exceedingly useful that could be for resource management efficiency and time-saving in project planning - the ability to assign the available time (from workload and time-sheet analysis) for people and other project resources (e.g., including offices, computer systems, electronic displays or whiteboards), and for a standard cost for all resources to be fed back into any plan.

From experience, whenever I have seen MSP "do something that doesn't make sense", it has generally been because of my ignorance. For example, where I had not understood the rules that MSP was working under in such-and-such a case. I have never yet found MSP to be buggy, or badly-designed, though I personally found it required considerable effort to fully understand how it worked. With that understanding came a much better appreciation of what the tool could do. I moved from finding the the product to be frustratingly stubborn to having a great deal of respect for what it could do and for the design efforts put into it by Microsoft's MSP applications development team - not a bad effort.    :Thmbsup:

Innuendo:
I applaud Iain's tutoring skills, but I have to re-iterate what he has been stating since his first post in this thread. Microsoft Project is a beast that takes a lot of practice, training, and knowledge to tame. In Microsoft's stable of products, it's only rivaled by Excel as being a program with a simple interface that is a gateway into a world of complex commands, equations, and funky syntax that only be mastered by dedicating a lot of time to master the techniques that will make it bow to your will.

I have college coursework in IT project management and one of our tools was Microsoft Project 2013. We used the bejeezus out of it and I mastered everything we were taught, but I still left knowing there was a lot we had not had time to learn. I felt like we had barely scratched the surface of the power contained within the code.

So, yeah...questions about Microsoft Project posed in a cozy little software forum nestled in a corner of the internet is going to yield some simple, yet effective advice. However, if you are coming into using Microsoft Project cold with no prior learning or training, then a forum thread is not going to lead you to the land of milk & honey.

This endeavor is not something on the level of "Hey, I just bought a second monitor and I need to know how to set things so a different wallpaper is displayed on each one". That the OP states that Project is a badly designed program tells me that he has no prior experience with it or much knowledge regarding it.

Without formal training or at least a how-to-for-dummies book in your toolbox, a dance with Microsoft Project is going to only lead to death, destruction, the wringing of hands, the wailing of women, and the gnashing of teeth. (One or two of these things may not happen.)

Little known fact....the avatar Iain uses is really a picture of him. He's been trapped in that ugly sweater vest since 2008 as the result of a freak Microsoft Project accident. Don't let it happen to you. Respect the code.

dr_andus:
If the objective is to end up with a Gantt chart to stick into someone's PowerPoint presentation, there might be other (lot more user-friendly) options out there and the end user may never know (or need to know) that it wasn't produced in MS Project.

I used RationalPlan some time ago, which I found a lot simpler and easier to use than MS Project (though not for presentational purposes but for actual project planning).

It seems to have got a bit more expensive since I bought it, but the Linux version is free. And there might be other free sofware (possibly even PPT add-ons) that can create a nice-looking Gantt chart.

Ath:
but the Linux version is free.
-dr_andus (May 23, 2015, 11:13 AM)
--- End quote ---
So you have an implicit intention to expose kalos to Linux :'( that'll keep 'm busy for a while ;D ;D ;D

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