eaglehatman
Programmer
I have Project 2007 installed on my computer, and am opening files created and maintained by other users in Project 2003. All of these users unilaterally use fixed duration tasks, not effort driven. They care only about linear scheduling through the production floor where Start Date 1 + duraton 1 = End Date 1 = Start Date 2 ad nauseum. Which is really a crude way to use Project, but that's their business.
The crux of teh problem started when I wrote a program to extract the Durations from their schedules and report them in another application. All of the schedule owners reported that most of those values were wrong when reported in teh other application. A review of the situation yielded that all of teh durations on tasks that had resources assigned were changing upon recalculation when opened in 2007. The short fix is to simply turn off recalculation, pull the values and close... that works. But it begs teh questions of HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN. As I began to examine this I realized that in teh recalculation, Project 2007 was simply forcing Duration = Work/Units. When the file was opened, all tasks with resources assigned Duration <> Work/Units. So I opened several of these files on the owners computers to show them how fragile their files were... pressed F9, said Voila, and the Durations remained unchanged, not equalling anything close to Work/Units. What's worse is that these people tell me that when all o ftheir files are imported into teh grand unifying file that the whole production floor uses, none of these values remain accurate... so they have been seeing this symptom for years without understanding why. I am building a program to open these files, force proper Duration = Work/Units on each task, preserving their origginal durations, start dates and end dates, basically repairing the files. But before I deploy it, I feel a need to understand WHY this happened, and evaluate the likelihood of it happening again. It just plain makes no sense to me, and after a week of searching forums and articles and help files, I just can't wrap my brain around it... perhaps this is well documented and just haven't hit the right search terms yet, but I would appreciate some guidance at the very least. Thanx in advance.
The crux of teh problem started when I wrote a program to extract the Durations from their schedules and report them in another application. All of the schedule owners reported that most of those values were wrong when reported in teh other application. A review of the situation yielded that all of teh durations on tasks that had resources assigned were changing upon recalculation when opened in 2007. The short fix is to simply turn off recalculation, pull the values and close... that works. But it begs teh questions of HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN. As I began to examine this I realized that in teh recalculation, Project 2007 was simply forcing Duration = Work/Units. When the file was opened, all tasks with resources assigned Duration <> Work/Units. So I opened several of these files on the owners computers to show them how fragile their files were... pressed F9, said Voila, and the Durations remained unchanged, not equalling anything close to Work/Units. What's worse is that these people tell me that when all o ftheir files are imported into teh grand unifying file that the whole production floor uses, none of these values remain accurate... so they have been seeing this symptom for years without understanding why. I am building a program to open these files, force proper Duration = Work/Units on each task, preserving their origginal durations, start dates and end dates, basically repairing the files. But before I deploy it, I feel a need to understand WHY this happened, and evaluate the likelihood of it happening again. It just plain makes no sense to me, and after a week of searching forums and articles and help files, I just can't wrap my brain around it... perhaps this is well documented and just haven't hit the right search terms yet, but I would appreciate some guidance at the very least. Thanx in advance.