Copy and Paste Tasks (entire line/record)

[Peggy Cornett]

MSP 2007 SP1
Are there risks associated with copying and pasting tasks (entire lines) to
other locations within the same schedule, to other schedules? Does it matter
if the tasks are not yet baselined? If so, what are the risks and why? This
appears to work beautifully for what we need. It keeps the outline structure
too.

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Peggy --

The risk of copying and pasting (or cutting and pasting) entire rows of task
information is internal file corruption due to duplicate enterprise Unique
ID numbers. It does not matter whether the tasks are baselined or not.
Because of this, proceed only at your own risk. I will gladly invite others
to share their thoughts on this issue as well. Hope this helps.

PS -- Spunky, we missed you at the Project Conference last month!

 

[.jussi]

Hi Peggy,

Like Dale said, there are risks. When you are copy/pasting an entire line,
you are copying the entire task with all of its relations and existing data.
This means that if you have filled in data, users have submitted actuals or
you have anything else tied to the task that is specific to the task you are
copying from... all of this data is copied to the new task. This is a problem
especially with actuals.

For projects that have not been published yet, it is my experience that copy
- pasting tasks is more or less safe. For active projects, it will likely
cause more problems than save work.

Bottom line, I've told my project managers not to do it.

Hope that helps,
- Jussi