Highlighting the critical path

[sK]

I am managing a very lengthy schedule. I recently went through to weed out
all tasks that were 100% complete. For those completed tasks that had
incomplete successors, I moved them to a section called completed tasks and
restablished the links.
Now when I filter for critical tasks and try to highlight them, nothing is
highlighted, whereas before I was able to highlight the critical path. Can
anyone tell me why that might be. We are wondering if the Completed tasks
section would affect this?

 

[salgud]

I am managing a very lengthy schedule. I recently went through to weed out
all tasks that were 100% complete. For those completed tasks that had
incomplete successors, I moved them to a section called completed tasks and
restablished the links.
Now when I filter for critical tasks and try to highlight them, nothing is
highlighted, whereas before I was able to highlight the critical path. Can
anyone tell me why that might be. We are wondering if the Completed tasks
section would affect this?

In Project, by default, completed tasks are no longer marked as Critical,
even though they are on the CP. You could probably override this using the
Bar Styles dialog box, though I've never actually tried to do so.

Hope this helps in your world.

 

[DavidC]

Hi Sk,

why did you do all those changes to your schedule?

I understand that you had a critical path and then you moved all compleetd
tasks in a way that broke the links, and then had to re-establish those
links. If that is the case then you have a difference in your links. If
incomplete activities were on the critical path before then they should
remain so as long as the logic (links) remain the same.

Do you have the box "Automatically link moved or inserted tasks" ticked in
the dialog box under Tools/Options? If you do then the logic will change
when you shifted all the completed tasks.

If you have the original version then use that and simply untick the box
mentioned above, and if you must move the completed tasks to a new section
then do so, howver remember that there is a filter called "Incomplete" which
will normally also filter out all completed tasks. In fact I set the default
on the gantt chart to use an incompleted filter since anything that is
complete is now only history and cannot be changed.

Hope this helps you

regards

DavidC

 

[sK]

I inherited this schedule, that I believe was originally created within MS
Project server and it incorporated other schedules not created as enterprise
schedules. All of these schedules had different templates, differnt level of
detail. It was behaving strangely. When I inherited the schedule, I wanted
to recreate the best I could in a new file and clean up the false
dependencies and reduce the funny behaviour from a corrupt file. I also tried
to limit constraints and tried to do as litte cutting and pasting as
possible. However, since I just inhertied this, I have limited knowledge of
the project, so I created a compeleted tasks section and linked to it so I
did not fully lose the history of what had been done and why dates are where
they are at. Long story made short, the project is serioulsy out of control
and I am trying to step in figure out what is going on.

The question still remains as to why it seems Project is calculating the
cirtical path when I display it in the Gantt chart, but won't highlight the
tasks when i filter for it.

 

[Mike Glen]

Hi sK,

By definition, critical tasks hve zero slack, unless
Tools/Options.../Calculation tab has days recorded in the less than or equal
to box at the bottom. You could try Inserting the Total Slack column to see
which tasks have changed Total Slack figures.

FAQs, companion products and other useful Project information can be seen at
this web address: http://project.mvps.org/faqs.htm

Hope this helps - please let us know how you get on

Mike Glen
MS Project MVP
See http://tinyurl.com/2xbhc for my free Project Tutorials