From the course: Microsoft Project 2021 and Project Online Desktop Essential Training

The difference between auto and manual scheduling

From the course: Microsoft Project 2021 and Project Online Desktop Essential Training

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The difference between auto and manual scheduling

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- With auto scheduled tasks, project automatically calculates task, dates and durations which is a must for all but the smallest projects. With manually scheduled tasks, you can stay in control of task dates and duration or flag missing task information. I have an abbreviated schedule here just to show you an example of these types of tasks. We're going to start with auto-scheduled. Tasks three and four identify requirements and draft budget. If you go to the task mode cells, you'll see icons that tell you that these tasks are auto scheduled. That means that the duration of 25 days will define based on the start date will define when it finishes. So for example, it starts on the project start date January 8th and it finishes 25 work days later, and it finishes 25 work days later, which is five weeks, so it finishes on February 9th. Now I'm going to scroll over in the time scale a little bit by clicking in the horizontal scroll bar and you can see that these tasks are linked to each other. So, draft budget is going to start after identify requirements finishes. And sure enough, identify requirements finishes on a Friday, February 9th. So, draft budget starts on Monday, February 12th. Now let's say that we decide to change the duration of identify requirements. We're going to change it to 20 days instead of 25. So I'm going to type in 20. I don't have to type a D for days because duration is by default added in days, unless you specify otherwise. So when I press enter, you'll see that it finishes the Friday before, you'll see that it finishes the Friday before, it's now February 2nd, which means that draft budget it's now February 2nd, which means that draft budget starts the following Monday, February 5th. starts the following Monday, February 5th. So project calculates those changes for you which is a lot easier than calculating it yourself. Now let's take a look at manually scheduled tasks. Setting tasks to manually scheduled is like do-it-yourself scheduling. You can set the dates and durations instead of project calculating them. For instance, when you know that a meeting or class occurs on specific dates. But it has other helpful features as well. Let's say that you don't have all the information you need. I'm going to add another task to this schedule and I'm going to right click task ID five and on the shortcut menu, choose insert task. Now that inserts an automatically scheduled task. You can see in the task mode, it has the same icon as all the others. But I can click this cell, click the down arrow and choose manually scheduled. And when I do that, the icon changes to a push pin which is the icon for manually scheduled tasks. Project fills in a default name, new task. So the first thing I'm going to do here is put in an actual name for this task. I'm going to use abbreviations but I'm going to call it review requirements with management. And then I'll tab over into the duration cell. Because I initially inserted an automatically scheduled task, the duration is set to one day question mark and the dates are set to the project start date. But let's say that I don't know what the duration is so, I can type a note to myself that I don't know and then move to the start cell and say, well, I better ask the manager when they want the meeting. So you can put in these placeholder values when you don't know the actual answers. And for that matter I could also remove the date in the finish cell. Then, once you get the information, you can add that in. So the first thing is, you decide that it's a pretty good bet that the duration is going to be one day. So instead of the don't know, you can just type in a one and press enter and it changes the duration to one day. So you've specified that. Notice the icon in the task mode cell has a question mark because there's still some unknown information. So some time passes and the manager gets back to you and says, let's do this meeting on February 23rd. So you can type in the date, February 23rd So you can type in the date, February 23rd and then press enter. Once you do that, we've got the duration and the start and finish date. And if you look over in the time scale, you'll see that the task bar is a light teal color. you'll see that the task bar is a light teal color. That means it's manually scheduled and it has darker teal caps on the end and it has darker teal caps on the end because we actually have specified the duration and the dates. the duration and the dates. Those are the differences between auto scheduled and manually scheduled tasks and when you might use them.

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