Days span one day longer than duration 1

[alanla]

Hi,
Looking for some help. When I enter a task that has one days duration into project. It spans two two days in MS project. That is although task is only one day duration it starts on day 1 and finishes on day 2. For tasks longer than one days duration one exra day is added to the span. That is if their is a five day task and it starts on day one it will finish on day six.
Is their a flag or setting I can change to avoid this.

 

[PDQBach]

You've probably changed something else and haven't passed that information along.

First: Tools | Options | View-tab and next to "Date Format" choose one that shows the date-and-time.

Second: Tools | Options | Calendar-tab and reset "Hours per day" back to 8, Hours per week back to 40, and Days per month back to 20.

I don't believe this will change existing tasks and they will continue to show the apparent anomaly you describe above.

Now, enter new tasks and report back.

 

[djoliver1]

I'm tagging on to this problem with the question, how can you fix the problem. Let's say you are taking over someone's schedule with 4000 tasks and you discover this problem. Troubleshooting the problem, you notice that Tools/Change Working Time shows a default working time which is different from what is shown under Tools/Options/Calendar/Default Start and End Times. So you reset these so that the two calendars agree. However, your 4000 tasks are still following the wrong start and end times. The recalculate button under Tools/Options/Calculations will not fix this problem. How can you fix it without redoing your schedule completely? Or if you have to redo your schedule, is there a quick way to cut and paste it into a new schedule? Any help or work around would be greatly appreciated. (My problem is the opposite of the original poster, but in principle the same. The working time was set to shorter than 8 hours, so the successor task is starting on the same day as the predecessor finishes!)
Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

 

[PDQBach]

djoliver1 is asking more than I can answer. I've never been in that situation because I was told (without a lot of explanation) "Just do it this way: don't mess with ..." so I never messed with default days and durations, etc.

Having said that ... if you're getting a 4000 task project, some of those tasks are in the past so you don't have to worry about them. The tasks that are coming up are not going to all happen at once so it should be possible on a "go forward" basis to bring "near term tasks" up to date with the corrected defaults. In addition, if you're the PM on such a project, you've likely got someone whose job is to keep the plan updated and so you would likely delegate that task to the person.

It's only when you start to think about making changes like this that you realize just how much work goes on "under the covers". The code for the scheduling engine must be an amazing piece of work since it has to take into account so many variables (project/task/resource calendars; default day, and month durations; task dependencies; task types; constraint types and dates; effort-driven/non-effort-driven; ...) into account. The fascination isn't that it works so well but, as Samuel Johnson observed in different circumstances, that it works at all!