Project task duration / end date (simple question!)

[Tomrps]

Hello, I have a (hopefully) quick question, best illustrated with the attached screenshot.

I'm not sure what's going wrong. Is Project trying to be too clever, perhaps trying to spread three months' work over a greater amount of time because it's not counting weekends or something like that? I'm using the default calendar. Switching to 24-hr calendar (for example) gives even sillier dates.

Can anyone help? How do I convince Project that a month is only a month long!?

Thanks in advance

 

[JulieInMaine]

What is your definition of "month" in File > Options, Schedule? What is your working day definition? Are you using the default Standard calendar with 8 working hours per day?

Are these manually scheduled tasks?

 

[Tomrps]

I found the solution - apparently Project has both "months" and "emonths" and it's the latter that are actually a month long. Bizarre, but at least it was a simple fix.

 

[JulieInMaine]

You haven't really solved the initial problem and may have created a potential issue down the road. An "emonth" to Project is 30 calendar days - counting weekends - which is normally non-working time. Each of the 30 days is 24 hours - not the usual 8 hours. So, if you assign a single resource to a 1 emonth task the resource will be scheduled for 24 hours of work for the next 30 days. Your work and cost estimates will be wildly off.

Julie

 

[Tomrps]

Yep, that's fine. This will never be used - it's just to create a graphic - Project is a wholly inappropriate tool but I don't get a say in that!

Thanks for your tips in any case though.

 

[JulieInMaine]

You're welcome. Hard to say whether Project is inappropriate without knowing more about what you need. Good luck