Forum Discussion
Question marks in the duration?
Hi, I am wondering why I always have question mark on the duration? Thanks, Jerome.
Jerome --
In addition to the excellent answer by my colleague, Tony, I wanted to let you know WHY Microsoft Project is displaying the question mark for tasks in the Duration column. The question mark symbol with the Duration value indicates that the Duration is an "estimated" Duration, which means that it is the default Duration value entered by Microsoft Project. When you manually enter a Duration value, then the question mark will disappear.
A best practice I recommend is to look for tasks that have the question mark displayed in the Duration column, as these represent tasks for which you have not yet entered a Duration value. Before your project goes live, NO task should display question mark in the Duration column. In a very large project, it can be quite a challenge to find every task that still has a question mark displayed in the Duration column. To help with this, you can apply the built-in Tasks with Estimated Durations filter in the More Filters dialog.
Hope this additional information helps.
In addition to the excellent answer by my colleague, Tony, I wanted to let you know WHY Microsoft Project is displaying the question mark for tasks in the Duration column. The question mark symbol with the Duration value indicates that the Duration is an "estimated" Duration, which means that it is the default Duration value entered by Microsoft Project. When you manually enter a Duration value, then the question mark will disappear.
A best practice I recommend is to look for tasks that have the question mark displayed in the Duration column, as these represent tasks for which you have not yet entered a Duration value. Before your project goes live, NO task should display question mark in the Duration column. In a very large project, it can be quite a challenge to find every task that still has a question mark displayed in the Duration column. To help with this, you can apply the built-in Tasks with Estimated Durations filter in the More Filters dialog.
Hope this additional information helps.