Calendars

[sirsleep29]

I have a schedule that I have been working on for about 9 months now which is built on the standard 5 day work week. Now, I want to possibly change the current schedule to a 7 day work week. How hard would it be to do this as I have about 600 line items with tasks that are in progress, completed and some that haven't started yet. Would it be easier to keep it as a 5 day schedule and just adjust the duration? We just use resources for durations and not for cost. Any help is appreciated.

Thank You

[#2]

@sirsleep29 ,
This may be easier than you think. Since you can't change history, tasks that are already completed will not change with the new calendar. Tasks that are in progress will partially change based on the new calendar (i.e. completed portion will not change but the overall task duration will change in response to the new calendar). Tasks that have not yet started will change to the new calendar.

For example, here is a simple plan with the Standard calendar:

Changing the Project Calendar to a 7 day workweek results in this:

Obviously, this is a simple example, a more complex plan may present some modified results.

John

[#3]

Hi John, thank you for the reply. I was playing around with this yesterday and I was looking at a task that started in August 2024, so any calendar changes should have changed this task. I changed it to a 7 day work calendar and it didn't appear to change anything. How do you make the changes or what are the steps you use when changing a calenadar over?

[#4]

@sirsleep29 

In the simple example I showed, I simply changed the Project Calendar from Standard to "7 day workweek" (Project > Properties group > Project Information > Calendar). This of course assumes a new custom calendar for the 7 day workweek was created.

With regard to the task that didn't seem to change, when you switched calendars, there are other factors that could be in play. For example, if the task had a resource assigned and the resource's Base Calendar is still "Standard", then the task probably wouldn't change. However, I'd have to see your file to determine exactly what is going on.

John

[#5]

 Happy New Year to all!

@sirsleep29 , perhaps defining different workday periods in the project calendar could help you.

To achieve this, simply enter the project calendar and add a row "7 day work week" for example, and have it start at the beginning of that period and end on a date after the end of the project.

Next, click on Details of that same calendar period, and select all the days of the week, assigning the corresponding time, as shown in the image.

Nota.- The [Default] work week specifies the work week to be used when no other work week entry applies.

Ignacio

[#6]

Good Morning, I appreciate the feedback and will try it out to see if it work for me. Thank You Again.

[#7]

@Ignacio_Martin  I think this will work for me but do you foresee any issues that could be caused by making the change? I worry that if I make the change and then all of a sudden I get a bunch of errors because of the change to the 7 day work week.  Thank You.

[#8 · Accepted solution]

Hi.
The first thing is to make a backup copy of the file, in case you don't like the results, but not because errors are generated.
Keep in mind that the calendar will only be applied to unfinished tasks, and only from the date on which you define the application of the new calendar hours.
Regards.
Ignacio

[#9]

thank you Ignacio. You have been a big help. I am going to work on this today. My data has always been right in regard to start and finish tasks but the durations are incorrect and want to fix this.

[#10]

Hello Ignacio,

I have a followup question to that topic. I need it the other way round. I currently have a 7 day calender which was standard at Microsoft Project Professionell 2021 and I only want to show a 5 day week in the Gantt - Diagram. I cant find any solution online. There is advie at https://support.microsoft.com/de-de/office/%C3%A4ndern-der-zeitskala-in-einer-project-ansicht-in-pro... but that isnt what my MS Project version is showing me. Do you know how I can cut out the weekend from the Gannt - Diagramm?

I'm new to the community so I don't know how to post pictures here, but I hope you understand what my issue is 🙂

Thanks in advance for your help!

Regards,
Nils

[#11]

@Nils_Frankmoelle 

Hello Nils.

I think that in order to include photos on the blog, you have to register.

If what you are referring to is that when you have a time scale of days in the Gantt chart, the columns corresponding to Saturday and Sunday are not shown, even though they are non-working days in your calendar, unfortunately it is not possible to hide them. You can select not to display a background color for those days (Menu> View> Zoom> TimeScale> TimeScale> Non-Working time > Tab> Draw...), but the Saturday and Sunday columns will still appear.

Regarding the link to the document you indicate from Microsoft support, the view Calendar you refer to is different from the view Gantt chart, and there it can only show the days Monday to Friday.

I hope I've helped.

Ignacio

[#12]

Hello Ignacio,

thank you very much for your quick response!
You did get my problem right and helped me to find a way to maybe get a solution 🙂
Now I know, that sadly I can't hide the non-working days so I need to contact MS Project in order to fix my problem. I think they need to reintroduce the function that is shown in the link above so I can switch between the 7-day week to a 5-day week in the Gantt-diagram. Maybe they will do it, but let's see. I will give you an update if something happens.

Thanks for your kind help,
Nils