Liz said:
I am new to Project and I have a couple of detailed questions.
1. Can the field for DATE be used to automatically change the bars in the
Gantt chart? The only way I can get the bars to fill in the dates, is to
enter a start and finish date, but I have progress dates to show as well
before finishing the project.
2. Can the DATE fields be set to only month and year (no day).
3. Can the % COMPLETE be completed automatically as fields (such as progress
dates) are entered?
Liz,
Welcome to the "wonderful" wacky world of Project
Responding to your questions:
1. Which field for date? Project has several fields that can contain a
date. For example, there are the Start and Finish fields, baseline date
fields, and several spare date fields (e.g. Date1, Date2, etc.). And
what are you looking for when you say "...automatically change the
bars..."? By default, Project displays the resource names to the right
of Gantt bars. You can change that to display different project fields
by going to Format/Bar Styles. Also by default, Project displays a
progress bar in the middle of Gantt bars. This progress generally
reflects the % Complete field value.
It also sounds like you are directly entering dates into the Start and
FInish fields. Doing so nullifies Project's scheduling engine and
basically defeats the reason for using Project. See my suggestion at the
end of this response.
2. Date fields will always include the day. The various options
available for display in date fields can be set under Tools/Options/View
tab, Date Format.
3. Progress dates are not entered, rather % complete or % work complete
are entered to indicate progress. The "progress date" is the status date
(i.e. the day when the project was updated to reflect the current
status). The status date is entered under Project/Project Information,
Status Date, but, entering the status date does not automatically update
tasks.
Since you are new to Project I suggest you get some training on how to
properly use the application. Project is not a very intuitive or
user-friendly application, despite what Microsoft's advertising may say.
If nothing else, go to our MVP website at,
http://masamiki.com/project/macros.htm, and click on fellow MVP, Mike
Glen's tutorials. You might also want to look into MSProjectExperts.com.
Hope this helps.
John
Project MVP
