I think of this as the backbone of the Gantt chart. You need to set up your working day in Options. So here is the first part of this puzzle to get right. The next time you open up the calendar it will be in its chronological spot.
If you do need to add in a holiday day don’t worry about its chronological order just put it at the end of the list of exceptions. If you forget to put in a holiday day this is easily remedied. Remember that the length of the day in your calendars will impact your estimated durations if you change your calendars in the future. Read our Blog post on this ( Microsoft Project Calendars – How Accurately Do Working Times Have To Be Set?) for a better picture of this. In future posts I will delve into the calendars in depth, but before you commence developing your schedule you need to decide. Sometimes near enough is good enough! Is it critical to the schedule that we know that at 6.30am a task needs to start? Or that our working day is 7.5 hours rather than 8? Sometimes the answer to this question is “Yes” and Microsoft Project can provide us with very detailed days and weeks both for the project, individual activities and resources. Beware however of overworking the calendars. For some projects not having the calendars calculating correctly can have a major impact on planned completion dates. Without that your schedule may be feeding you incorrect data and will no doubt prompt some questions from stakeholders. The calendars and start date provide the base on which to build your programme of work.
Once you know the steps, though, its easy and our advice to clients is to consider saving templates that contain the setup you require for most projects and save yourself a great deal of work and also the risk of human error. Project can be infuriating at times and this is definitely one of them. You might have put holidays in but not see them on the Gantt chart. Examples of this are where you see the bars on the Gantt chart are not beginning at the start of the day, or a day extends over into the next day. The calendars in Microsoft Project are a complete mystery to some users of the application.
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