Microsoft Project 2013: The Missing Manual

Setting Standard Workdays

The amount of available working time has a big impact on how quickly a project finishes. A mission-critical project to beat the competition to market might opt for longer workdays during the week with some weekend overtime as well. On the other hand, if you’re building a vacation house on a tropical isle, you might have to adjust the working time for the more relaxed work schedules that hot sun and siestas induce. You need a calendar to indicate which days and times are available for work.

In Microsoft Project, calendars have working and nonworking days and times blocked out. You can use one of the program’s built-in calendars, modify existing calendars, or build brand-new ones for unusual work schedules. Then you can apply a calendar to an entire project to set the standard working times, which is perfect for specifying the holidays for your organization or telling Project that Fridays are half-days for your company. You can also define and apply calendars to individual people—for instance, to specify luxuriously long scheduled vacations—or to tasks—for example, to schedule a task to run around the clock until it’s done. (See the box on How Calendars Control Schedules for more details.)

To keep Project’s work and duration calculations accurate, it’s important that the number of hours Project assumes for duration match the hours those durations represent in your organization’s typical work schedules. Project’s calendar options control how the program converts ...