Forum Discussion
% Complete - doesn't seem to calculate properly, what am I missing?
I am fiddling with Project for the Web / Premium Planner in an attempt to make YouTube tutorial content. I'm creating tasks, trying to make some sample content, and setting the completed/remaining hours to be partially done to simulate an in-progress project.
What I'm noticing is that the %Complete tries to auto-update, but seems to be calculating really oddly? Like it's coming out with 6% complete for 1 hr completed + 1 hr remaining = 2 hr total. Am I misinterpreting what it's trying to do or is it not functioning?
When I try to manually set the %Complete to 50% to override, it changes out the hours to be very different and it still doesn't come out right.
3 Replies
This issue is because % complete is a % complete of the duration, not the effort.
When you update % complete Planner looks to see how much effort has been scheduled in a time-phase. The easiest way to think of this is hours per day, but it is looking at increments of hours (I haven't yet worked out the smallest increment).
When you update % complete Planner calculates the % complete of the duration and then calculates the total effort that was scheduled within that duration.
You can only see time phase information in the 'assignments' view (and licensing issues may stop you from seeing this)
For example if I were to update % complete with 20% as per the example below the effort completed would show as 0 hours.
If were to update effort completed with 7.4 the % complete field would calculate to 40%.
If you were to update % complete with 50% that would be time point sometime on Wednesday.
Unfortunately there are more factors at work:
For example there are start and finish times that impact on how Planner schedules effort, so sometimes I am finding that it has scheduled start from 12.00 on the first day and puts all the other hours on the last day. In this case even if you update the effort as say 50% of 37 the % complete may calculate to an unexpected figure, because e.g. only 10 hours have been scheduled by the mid point of the duration.
Unfortunately I do not believe there is a way to edit time although you can see it if you hover above the start and finish fields.
I'm also encountering the same problem with math errors in Planner premium.
I can reproduce the problem by creating a new task, setting the duration to 1 day, setting the total effort to 8 hours, making the task 50% complete, and then changing the duration to 3 days. I can un-break the task by resetting the duration to 1 day, which reduces the total effort to 4.8 hours, and then resetting the total effort to 8h. Then it seems to work normally again.
New task with duration, effort, and partially complete:
Task after changing duration to 3 days. Completed effort and remaining effort were automatically changed.
Task after reducing duration back to 1 day. Total effort, completed effort, and % complete were changed automatically.
The math is now totally broken for the task. Reducing the % complete to 0, correcting the total effort to 8 hours, and increasing the % complete to 50% give a new incorrect value for completed effort.
I am also experiencing a similar issue. I figured the problem on my end was that I had not properly set the effort data but after doing so (painstakingly), the percentages still are not accurate:
