Forum Discussion
Gantt chart help with late, but active task formatting
John-project, I tried everything that you show, but it's not working....not sure what I missed.
Further troubleshooting shows that the flag never evaluates to "Yes" (overdue). So there's something wrong with that, though what that is I'm unsure of.
- Freeboro,
First of all, why are you using manual scheduling? From my view, if you want to do manual scheduling forget Project, do your plan in Excel.
I see you added the new Gantt bar style at the beginning of the list. The Gantt bar style list has a reverse order precedence, that is, bar styles lower in the list take precedence over bar styles at the beginning of the list, if there is a conflict. Could be your new bar style is getting "upstaged" by a bar style lower in the list.
In order to help further with your formula, I'll need to see a screen shot showing the relevant fields such as Start, Finish, Duration, % Complete, Flag 1, Baseline Finish.
JohnBecause I have 6+ people managing projects that I need to consolidate into a summary type doc for my superiors. We were using Excel and I was spending hours per week to sync their top level tasks with my project master. I thought creating a master project doc, and then adding all of theirs as linked sub-projects would fix that and I don't know why the type of scheduling matters?
I've attached a snip. Everything looks like it should to me, but the formula (Overdue?) isn't evaluating correctly.
- Freeboro,
Manual scheduling has one purpose and that is to help create a rough outline of a project plan. It basically replaces the "stickies on a wall" approach from yesteryear. However, once a plan is developed, all tasks should be set for auto-scheduling. That's the only way Project's scheduling engine can help show how the plan will play out with each task contributing to the total network logic of the plan. Manual scheduling for an active plan is no better than doing the whole plan in Excel. The only thing Excel lacks is the Gantt display but I've seen add-ins to create to create Gantt type graphics in Excel.
That's why the type of scheduling matters.
I think the issue with your Flag1 formula not working is because you have calculation set to "off". In Project go to, File > Options > Schedule group and set Calculation to "on".
In your initial post you mentioned you have a master file with inserted subprojects. Just a word of caution about using that structure. None of the files in the structure should ever be renamed, moved, written over or "saved off" to another location. Ideally all files should be in a single directory on a local drive and not on a remote server. If those "rules" are an issue for you, there are other ways to set up a reporting structure.
John
