Microsoft Project 2013: The Missing Manual

Defining When Work Resources Are Available

You may have already assigned a calendar for your project, as described on Applying Calendars, to indicate when work usually takes place. But even if your office is open from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., not everybody works the same hours. Creating separate calendars for people whose schedules don’t follow the norm tells Project when people are available to work on their assigned tasks. The schedule is more accurate when Project knows about people’s vacations, days off, and odd work hours. Project has two ways to specify when resources work, but each method approaches working time differently:

• A resource calendar comes in handy for setting aside days off and spelling out specific hours that a resource works—for example, Monday through Thursday from 8:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. with an hour at 12:00 p.m. for lunch. You can also use a resource calendar to specify part-time work schedules like Monday through Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.

• Availability, specified by resource units, tells Project what percentage of time the resource is available. For example, most resources work full time during normal working hours. You can alter a resource’s units (in the Maximum Units field, which is usually abbreviated to Max. Units) to tell Project that someone works part time, or that a resource is really a three-person team. For example, the folks who work part time could have Max. Units of 60 percent if they work 3 days a week. If you use a resource calendar to ...