Newbie: Recurring task questions: Adding Notes to it and ending up. 1

[giacino]

Hi,

I am new to MS Project (and this forum). I searched the archive and didn't find answers.

Therefore my 2 questions are:

- Can I add notes to a Recurring Task? It's task information window doesn't have the "notes" tab that is usually available for a single task. I can enter notes for each instance of the recurring task but not the summary level of the recurring task.

- Can I have the recurring task end date be tie to the Project Summary Task? In other words, can the end date of the recurring task be synced with to the end date of the project (whatever date it is). It seems that the recurring task needs a fixed date, but if my project finished later or earlier, I wish the recurring task to be adjusted automatically. Is it possible?

Thank you in advance for your insights.
Sincerely,
Guillaume

 

[PDQBach]

1. Yes (but not the same way as you do for every other task in the project!). In any Task view, insert the Notes column and put your notes there. The individual recurring tasks do allow you to attach a note the same way as all other tasks. This behaviour, by the way, continues in P2010.

2. No. The Start and Finish dates of the Project task (task id of 0) are derived from (for the Start date) the earliest Start of all tasks and (for the Finish) the latest Finish date of all tasks. Thus if you have a recurring task that goes out beyond all other tasks, then the Finish date of the Project task will be the finish date of that last occurrence of the recurring task.

I've never been a big fan of recurring tasks. They tend to be things like Status meetings and tracking them doesn't really track project progress.

 

[giacino]

Thanks for the trick, this is what I was looking for.
Sincerely,
Guillaume

 

[PDQBach]

As an addendum

In Prj2010, there is a concept called an "inactive task" ... basically, it stays in the schedule but doesn't roll up to the appropriate summary task(s).

So I tried creating a recurring task and determined what the Project task 0 showed as the end date. Sure enough, it showed the end date of the last occurrence of the recurring task.

Then I set the two last tasks of the recurring task to "inactive" and was quite pleased to see that the Task 0 Finish date changed to reflect the fact that inactive tasks aren't supposed to roll up to their respective Summary task(s).