Forum Discussion
Task Start and Finish dates not in synch with Assignments view
PaulaH95 --
I duplicated the steps you exactly as you described them, and following is what I see. The Start date of the task as 09/16/24 is correct, since that is the date on which you entered 0h of work. If you Zoom the Assignments view to the Daily level, you will note that there are blank entries for each of the work days during the week of September 15; however, those dates actually contain 0h for each day, even though the zeroes are not displayed. This means that the Start date of the task is 09/16/24.
Also, during the following two weeks, Project for the Web timephased the work hours as .8h per day for each work day. This means that the Finish date of 10/04/24 is also correct. So, what I see in Project for the Web is CORRECT in both the Grid view and the Assignments view.
My question for you is why you followed this totally convoluted process of timephasing the work on the task. If the work does not start until 09/23/24, why didn't you enter that date in the Start field for the task? So, based on what I see in your project and my experimental project, the Start dates and Finish dates ARE correct. Hope this helps.
Hi Dale,
thank you so much for your detailed analysis and explanation, this is very helpful! I now understand the logic behind it.
The reason I followed this process is this: Since I have a table with weekly availabilities of my resources I would like to plan my tasks in the Assignments view while consulting my availabilities table. So I might assign Jane to work for 16 hours on task A in week x, and since she then still has 4 hours left in that week, I decide to get her started on task B. That means the Start and Finish dates for tasks may evolve from my planning activities in the Assignments view.
My problem is that I have to assign some dummy start date to every task, otherwise the task will not show up in the Assignments view. But it is in the Assignment view that I look at my resource availabilities and decide when the work gets actually done. Even if I know my planned Start and Finish date in advance and set them initially when creating the task, I might need to make changes to the assignments later on. So for my way of working it would make sense for MS Project to interpret zero hours as "no work" and set the Start and Finish dates accordingly.
