How to enter duaration 4h and 32 min?

[Mindaugas Bliûdþius]

How can i engter duaration 4h and 32min? Do i need every time convert min to
hours and add it to hours????

 

[Andrew]

You can change the duration to be entered mins (Tools, Options, Schedule) and
convert hours to mins or, you could just enter a duration of 4.5 hours,
what's 2 mins between friends!

 

[John]

How can i engter duaration 4h and 32min? Do i need every time convert min to
hours and add it to hours????

Mindaugas,
Project will support either hours or minutes in time based fields but
not both. In other words, you will need to enter the duration in hours
and fractional hours or in minutes. To facilitate the conversion of all
Duration values to minutes you can run the built-in macro called "Format
Duration". Go to Tools/Macro/Macros and find "Format Duration" in the
selection list. Then hit "run".

You should be aware that Project calculates all time related data to the
nearest minute so even if a duration is entered as "hours" it is
actually treated as minutes. For example, internally Project stores 1
hour as 60 minutes. The setting suggested by Andrew in his response
applies only to the visual presentation in the view.

Hope this helps.
John

 

[Steve House [MVP]]

I have to comment - how can you schedule the activities in a human's workday
to the minute? Tasks are activities performed by resources. With very rare
exceptions things just aren't that precise. Unless you're talking about
launch windows for space probes or re-entry burns on the shuttle that have
to be timed to the second, you're going to be real lucky to get hourly
precision, must less minute level.

 

[John]

I have to comment - how can you schedule the activities in a human's workday
to the minute? Tasks are activities performed by resources. With very rare
exceptions things just aren't that precise. Unless you're talking about
launch windows for space probes or re-entry burns on the shuttle that have
to be timed to the second, you're going to be real lucky to get hourly
precision, must less minute level.

Steve,
Now I have to comment on your comment. First Mindaugas is looking at
duration, not work. Although I have never dabbled in non-standard uses
of Project, based on some of the posts I've seen, it is possible the
"activity" associated with the strange duration is non-human (e.g. some
process or machine operation). Second, and this is admittedly a real
nit, I think you meant to say "much less" in your last sentence instead
of "must less".

I go away now.

John

 

[Dean]

It will take two fields, but you can at least have Project calculate the
duration for you to copy everything from Duration1-10 to Duration. Assuming
you enter time in the format 4:32 in Text1, customize a duration field using
the formula:
IIf([Text1]="",[Duration],IIf(InStr(1,[Text1],":")=0,0+[Text1],left([Text1],InStr(1,[Text1],":")-1)*60+right([Text1],2))).

The 0+ in 0+[Text1] is important, because without the 0+, if someone enters
simply "6", the formula returns 6 hours. With the 0+, if someone enters "6",
the formula returns 0.01 days, 0.1 hrs, 6 minutes or whatever your default
duration units are set to.

Steve: On the whole, you are correct, but in some cases, minutes count.
I helped create a schedule for a maintenance project where the average task
is three minutes. The actual times for individual tasks vary, but the
aggregate is fairly predictable.

 

[Steve House [MVP]]

One of the Rules of Thumb in scheduling is the 8/80 rule. If your durations
are less than 8 hours you trying to micromanage to an unrealistic degree and
if they're over 80 hours you're probably not breaking down your WBS far
enough. While some individual activities in your maintainance project might
well be as small as 3 minutes, why do you need to actually manage each
discrete activity, scheduling it to the minute? If Bill is polishing 100
cams, does it really matter if he polishes cam number 47 between 14:32 and
14:35 or doesn't do it until the 14:53 to 14:56 time interval? Indeed, take
a survey of your resources and you'll probably find the variance in their
wristwatches are more than your scheduling precision! Seems to me that in
99.9% of the cases, all that really matters is that Bill will start
polishing cams on Tuesday morning and they'll be done by Tuesday afternoon,
early'ish. I'm a big believer in letting your resources organize their own
work while you schedule to the big picture and then manage-by-exception
where possible. Certainly there are some things that need minute level
precision or even tighter - say, network broadcast scheduling - but I still
contend they are relatively rare.