Jalaj P. Jha Technical & Miscellaneous Ramblings

MS Project : Define General Working Time

When I worked for the First time on Microsoft Project 2003 I had no idea of what lies where..., and here is where the Project Guide helped me out. It's a set of wizards that guides you step by step to what you would typically be required to work for creating a new project. I discussed the first of the guide "Define the Project" from "Task" Subcategory in one of the previous post Starting with Microsoft Project. Let's move on with the next guide "Define General Working Times".


In the step 1, Standard Calendar Templates are displayed to choose from. By Default they are "Standard", "24 hours", "Night Shift". These calendars define the Working Days, Working Times etc. Step 2 provides changing Working days. You can chose to use the default working hours or modify the working hours for each day or apply a modification to all working days. By default the Working hours are defined in two shifts separated by Lunch time, you can add upto 3 additional shifts by clicking the relevant link. Step 3 lets you Holidays and days off using the "Change Working Time..." dialog. It is this interface which is capable of doing everything that the Guides facilitates you. We would detail it later. Step 4 lets you set additional parameters as "hours pre day", "Hours per week" and "Days per month". Step 5 allows you to define additional calendars by going through previous steps. You can save here and finish.

Now let's see how you can bypass the Guide to do all these tasks. Open the "Change Working Time..." dialog under "Tools" in the main menu bar. The dialog looks like the one below and carries, in the center, a calendar that can show months/dates from January 2084 to December 2049. A drop down list at the top shows the standard templates. You can choose to make modifications to one of those or create a new one by clicking the button "New..." that appears at the bottom, in case of which you are presented with a small dialog allowing you to create a new template either based on one of the standard templates or a completely new one.

Once you have decided on which Calendar you are going to modify, you can start modifying Working days and working time using the radio button and text boxes on the right side. Before doing that let's clarify on term "default" used here. By "default" Microsoft Project means 5 working days from Monday to Saturday, working hours 8:00 to 12:00 and 13:00 to 17:00. The term default means above irrespective of calendar template that you might be using.

Say your project requires resources to work 6 days a week including Saturday as a working day. All you need to do is click on the calendar over "S" that stands for Saturday, now any change you make will be applied to all Saturdays. Click on the radio button "Non-default working time". This will change make Saturday a working day with working time set to the default ones.

Now say you need to change the working times for all working days as your organization works from 9:00 to 18:00 with lunch period 13:00 to 14:00. Select all the weekdays by clicking and dragging over week names "M" to "S". Click on "Non-default Working time" radio button and then change the working times given below the set of radio buttons. You can break the working time in as many as 5 shifts.

Consider a third scenario, when you need to mark a particular day as Holiday. Click on that particular day say "1st May" and click "Non-working time" radio button and you are done.

The Shading/underline on week names/days varies for different conditions as given under Legend on the left side. Click on the "Options..." button and you will be able to set various other parameters including those that we mentioned for Step 4 of the project guide.

You can create as many new calendars as you like without leaving this screen. Just click on "New..." button or chose a template from the drop down list and you will be prompted to save the previous work.