Predecessor for manually scheduled task

[techymom]

Hi,

Though all my tasks are manually scheduled but if I set a predecessor for task4 as task 1, MS Project automatically sets the start date of task 4 as equal to the next day of the task1 even though I want task 4 to start few days after task 1. How can I prevent that?

[#2]

@techymom 

This is the objective of using MS Project, ie having a scheduling engine facilitating the scheduling process with appropriate mecanisms. One of them is setting dependencies between tasks, so if you move a predecessor, the successor will move accordingly. 

If you do need a lag between your 2 tasks, double click on the link in the Gantt chart and enter a duration (+/-) for the delay between the tasks.

Just a through: if you don't need/want those scheduling capabilities, Excel might do the job.