Projects appear to have tasks from other projects

[Renee IT/PM]

We have several projects that seem to have tasks from other projects
associated to them.

Does anyone know what might cause this or how to correct it?

 

[Charles]

Hi Renee,

I have a project manager who is complaining about the same....I sent a
message to different guys and no one has answered. This is rather weird as
the projects do not have anything in common...
This is no answer...I just wanted to let you know that you are not alone....

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Renee --

If you see these "ghost tasks" in projects opened in Microsoft Project
Professional, then it is likely that someone opened both projects and set
one or more cross-project dependencies. If you double-click on one of those
"ghost tasks", the system will automatically open the other project. Does
this explain what you see? Let us know.

 

[Renee IT/PM]

Dale:
Thank you for the response. It appears that the "additional" tasks represent
all or most of the enterprise projects. Just today I went into one of the
projects (which I had printed out four days ago) and the "additional" tasks
are no longer appearing.

We just updated to SP2a/SP2 and I noticed that when I connect from MS
Project, the "Load summary..." checkbox now defaults to unchecked. What does
that do and could that have been affecting the projects?

Thank you,

Renee

 

[Renee IT/PM]

Update --
This issue was "most likely" caused by checking the "Load Summary..."
checkbox when connecting to the MS Project Server as MS Project was being
launched.

So far, all of the PMs that experienced this issue seem to be back to normal.

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Renee --

Good enough. You should select that option when you want to see summary
resource assignments in the Resource Usage view (tasks in each additional
project show as a single assignment for each project) and you should
deselect it when you don't want to see that information. The information is
useful for avoiding overallocations when you are ready to assign resources
to tasks, so this option should not be overlooked. Hope this helps.