The reason for that "craziness" is that the task list is not just a simple
outline organized by category. Projects produce a deliverable and that
final deliverable is in turn made up by smaller deliverables and they in
turn by smaller, etc, etc down to the level of the work done by one
skill-set producing one small deliverable. "Build House" is decomposed into
all the thing that have to happen to build it down to the point your
schedule says "Joe installs sink in second floor bathroom on Tuesday March
24th starting at 10am and it should take him 4 hours. That's one part of
Install Plumbing and the overall installation of the plumbing starts Monday
March 23 at 8am and finishes Friday at 5." The Summary Tasks, what you are
calling "headings" represent those larger level deliverables while the
subtasks are their components. So building a house is organized into
Acquire Site, Prepare Site, Lay Foundation, Erect Walls, Install Roof,
Finish Interior ... etc etc Each of those sections or phases takes time to
create - there's an observable start to laying the foundation and an
observable end when the foundation is completed. The time it takes to
complete that phase is the duration of the "heading" task "Lay Foundation.
In your example, there is a time before you start creating the "Brochures &
Postcards", then you start work on them at some specific point in time, and
after some length of time you will have created all the brochures and
postcards you will ever need for this project. Since the fundamental
purpose of MS Project's existence is to schedule the physical activities
that make up the work required to create thoise items, the duration of the
"Create Brochures & Postcards" phase is crucial to the development of the
overall plan.
I teach my students to try to always start their task names with an action
verb: WRITE the report, DIG the hole, PAINT the wall, MEET the client ...
This helps you keep focussed that every entry in the plan is either a group
of physical actions, a single physical action that is a component of the
group, or a marker of the outcome of a set of physical actions. Your
"headings" in a properly organized plan each should represent a group of
physical actions extending over a measurable period of time resulting in the
creation of one of the project's component deliverables.
Remember that Project's job is to tell you when you are able to do these
things. The reason it insists on showing you the dates for "Brochures &
Postcards" is that it is telling you that you need to start working on them
on the date displayed in the Start column and with the workflow you've
input, you can expect to be done with them on the Finish date and that's
when you can move on to the other things you need to do that can't start
without the brochures and postacards being available.
Hope this helps explain it
