Project for the Web: change start date without moving other dates

[JamieWightwick]

Hi,

I wonder if you folks can help. I want to amend the start date of a project in Project for the Web, but the little info tooltip alerts me that "changing the start date moves all of the dates in your project the same direction and amount."

Is there a way to tell it to not do that? 

(To explain; I essentially want to move my project start date back a couple of months to reflect we didn't start at the expected time (nobody in post to do the work) but for the most part the fundamental deadlines that need to be hit haven't changed, so I don't really want all of my other dates moving in response to that.*)

*Yes, I'm aware it's probably terrible project management at a fundamental level that we're not revising the deadlines, but there was a reasonable degree of slack around this so it's still achievable, honest!)

[#2]

Just wanted to give this a cheeky bump - would be great if any folk from the Project team watching are able to confirm either way / maybe suggest a workaround.  

I have access to Project Desktop - had wondered if I could export the P4W project to the desktop, change the dates, and then export again from Desktop to P4W? My only concern is I have a few custom fields in P4W that I wouldn't want to lose along the way...

[#3]

Jamie --

In your Project for the Web project, have you set task dependencies between each of the tasks? If yes, you can change the Start date of the project, and then change the Start date back for the first task in the project. If no, then you are out of luck, because you would have to manually change the Start date of every task.

To your second question, there is no way to export a Project for the Web project to the Microsoft Project desktop app, so that will not help to solve your problem. Hope this helps.

[#4]

Thanks for taking the time to reply Dale, appreciate it!

Just to check I'm getting the right of it - are you suggesting that the way around this would be for every task to be dependent on every other task, and then to simply change the date of the first task as required (as this would then cause every other task to adjust in response?) Would that have to be a S-F dependency?

Interesting workaround suggestion if I'm reading it right - would probably be a little awkward for me as there are genuinely quite a few tasks that don't flow from each other, so a lot of manual work required either way.

I'll tinker some more...

[#5]

Jamie --

Yes, you are correct. If you link every task with at least one Predecessor and at least one Successor, and then you change the Start date of the entire project, every task will move automatically. The dependency you would be using for most tasks is Finish to Start (FS), which is the default dependency that is set by Project for the Web. Hope this helps.