Calendars

Video: Creating New Calendar; Setting up Working Time; Recurrence

Toby: Welcome back to our course on Project 2013. In this section we’re going to look at

calendars and in fact we’re going to look a little bit more broadly at some of the scheduling parameters related to calendars within Project 2013.

So we’re going to start by looking at the calendar that’s in force by default for our building project and to do that we’ll go straight into Backstage View, into the Project Options, and we’ll look at the Schedule page in Project Options.

Now the first thing to note is that when you look at the top section on this page, Calendar Options for this project, once again you have a drop down. You have a drop down that lets you choose this particular project or all new projects. Now you may well have a standard calendar that you use on all your projects but you may have a particular one that gets a different calendar to everything else. So what do I mean by a calendar for a project? Well, for a particular situation, for a particular project that I’m working on, let’s take this building project as an example. Let’s suppose that the site is open for certain hours of the day, say from eight in the morning till six in the evening. And at that time people can do work on this project. That doesn’t necessarily mean that everybody who does any work on the project works all of that time. Individual people may have different calendars. They may have different availability. You may have somebody who only works in the mornings or somebody who only works Monday’s and Tuesday’s. But every project as a background needs a project calendar which is the basic time that work is done or is possible to be done on that project. Now when you install Project 2013, you’re setup with a default calendar that we’ll look at in a moment. It’s normally called the standard calendar or the base calendar. And unless you do otherwise that’s the calendar that’s going to be used to schedule your projects.

Now there’s an added complication in this which is a little bit baffling at first. But once you get used to the idea, it’s not so bad and that is that whatever your calendar says when it comes to actually doing some aspects of calculations Project also uses some other values that you setup in the Options here. So not only do you really need to make sure that your calendar is correct

which is something we’re going to look at a little bit later on but you also need to look at the settings that we’ve got here in our Options to make sure that everything fits.

So first of all, I have a couple of straightforward options here. One of them is on what day of the week does the week start? It’s a Sunday. That doesn’t necessarily mean you work on a Sunday but it just means that when we look at the calendar the first day we see will be Sunday. And the fiscal year start defaults to January. You can change that to one of the other months of the year for your fiscal annual reporting. We then have a default start time and a default end time for tasks. Now again this is not the same as the start time and end time as will appear on the calendar. As it says in the note here, these times are assigned to tasks when you enter a start or finish date without specifying a time. If you change this setting consider matching the project calendar using the Change working time command. It’s important to recognize that largely speaking the settings here are independent of the calendar and you can rather badly mess things up by having them out of step. If the projects you’re working on tend to be projects where each task is several days long, then start times and end times are less important. But if you’re dealing with projects where things may just take a couple of hours and it’s important to understand that this finish time during the day of something is important, then these start times and end times can be important as well.

Below those we have three very important numbers that are used particularly in the cost, scheduling and financing side of a project as we’ll see later on. How many working hours per day, how many hours per week, this is based on a five day working week, and how many days per month. Clearly, in reality the number of working days per month varies depending on which month it is, and then allowing for things like Christmas, public vacations, Easter and that sort of thing. But this is an average figure that’s used for some of the calculations that are done within Project 2013.

Now we’re going to take a look at the calendar next but just bear in mind that when we have done, you need to carefully consider making sure that what’s here agrees with what’s in the calendar. And if they get out of step, you can give yourself really quite a few problems.

So let’s take a look at this calendar. Let’s click on the Project tab and go to Change working time in the Properties Group and that brings up the Change Working Time dialog which includes

a view of the current standard project calendar. Now the standard project calendar is the default that comes with Project 2013. If your default, your standard calendar for your projects does not agree with this, then you can change the standard. If on the other hand, if it does basically agree with this but sometimes you have a project that needs a different calendar, then it’s a much better idea to take a copy of this and use a specific changed, modified copy of this as the calendar for that specific project that needs a different one. It’s not a good idea to keep changing the standard on backwards and forwards. It’s much better to have the standard one as your standard, your default, and then making specific different ones if the need arises than to keep changing the standard.

Now what I’m going to do in this case is I’m going to take a copy of this calendar and show you how to change the copy, how to modify the copy, but the same techniques could be used on the standard one if that was more appropriate in your case. So let’s click on Create new calendar and I’m going to call it my building calendar. Maybe this is the one that I use for all of my building projects. I can create a new base calendar from scratch so that means I specify everything or I can just make a copy of the standard calendar. I’m going to use a copy of the standard calendar as my starting point. So there’s my building calendar. It’s created, ready to use. Now what I’m going to do is to customize it to my specific requirements in this case.

There’s an area in the bottom of this dialog that deals with exceptions and work weeks. Let’s start with a standard week. Default, if I double click on Default it brings up a little dialog, Details for default, and this lets me define my standard working week; my default working week. So if I want to setup the working hours for my default working week what I can do is to go through the days of the week, Sunday through Saturday, and for each day of the week I can specify the working hours. If I step through the days now you can see what they are by default. So Monday, for example, you can see grayed out there 8 to 12, 1 to 5 and then the same for the other working days of the week and Saturday is a nonworking day. I can achieve either inheriting the values from the default, that’s what the first radio button there does, Use Project default times for these days. So by default that means Sunday and Saturday have been nonworking days, the others will be working days. Or I can specifically say Set the selected day or days to nonworking time or I can say Set the selected day or days to these specific working times. If I want to change the working times for Monday through to Friday, if I select all five of

those days by holding down Monday, the Shift key, and then Friday, so all five days are selected, I can click on Set days to these specific working times. Those areas are now editable and I can enter my new working times for the five working days of the week. So let me just click in the first one which currently says 8 a.m., if I click in there and change that to 9 a.m. Click in the next one which currently says 12 p.m. I’m going to change that to say 1 p.m. and then the From for the afternoon currently starts at 1 p.m. I’m going to change the, say, to 2 p.m., and then 5 p.m. change that to be 6 p.m. Now one important point to note there is that although I’ve changed those times, my working day is still eight working hours. So I’m not going to need to change the hours per day, working hours per day in my Project Options. But if I’d say change this from say 8 till 1 and 2 till 6 so there were nine working hours in the day, I would need to go into my Project Options to change the working hours per day. So let’s click on OK and I will have changed the standard working day in the standard working week. And you can actually see on the right here that on a standard working day like today, March 29th, my working hours are now 9 till 1 and 2 till 6.

So let’s just set that up in the Options. There’s a button at the bottom of the dialog here that takes us straight into the Project Options on to the Schedule page. Calendar options for just this project. I’m treating this project as an exception. I haven’t changed any of these things but my default start time is going to change to 9 a.m. and my default end time is now 6 p.m. in case that becomes important. Hours per day is the same, hours per week is the same, days per month no change there, click on OK.

Now one of the most important things to bear in mind when you’re working on calendars is that is there are significant differences to the standard calendar such as a different working week, a standard day, and in particular also when you have to take into account public holidays, it’s very important to get these in place before you start working on a project. If you introduce them later on, not only can it change the pattern of the project and cause you scheduling problems that you didn’t know you had, but you also might find yourself repeating work. If you’re going to use a standard calendar as the basis for all of your projects, make sure that the hours are right before you start scheduling projects but also make sure that public holidays are in place and try to get them in place as far in advance as you can.

Let’s take an example of a public holiday. The next one, this is currently March 29th

when I’m recording this. Let me just use the arrows to the right of the calendar here to go down to the month of April. I’m going to choose Monday, April 1st

and then I’m going to type in the exception box here, at the top of the exceptions tag, Easter Monday. Now this is a nonworking day. But if I just click there, note it picks up the date that I’ve selected, click on Details. By default, it becomes a nonworking day. If this were a repeating event then I could set this up as a recurrence. On this occasion, because Easter Monday doesn’t always happen on the same day then I’m not going to setup a recurrence. I’m going to say recurrence, daily, every one day, range of recurrence at the bottom. It starts on Monday, April 1st and it ends after that one occurrence. So it’s only a one off difference. Whereas on the other hand, if I went down to the month of December, December 25th is always a public holiday so let me select that, click here, Christmas, December 25th, go into the details, nonworking. This is a recurrence pattern. It happens every year on December the 25th and I can say end by and I can choose some date hugely in the future, say, go to the year 2020, click on OK, and now I’ll have Christmas scheduled as a nonworking day right through to the year 2020. So it’s very important that you get your public holidays in place as well.

So having setup one or two of the public holidays there are now several others to setup, but we also have to make this building calendar the calendar for this project and that’s what we’re going to do during the next section so please join me for that.

Video: Standard Calendar; Schedule Public Holidays; Adding Exceptions

Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Project 2013. In the previous section we

created a new calendar called building calendar and it had different hours of work from the ones that come by default with Project 2013 in the standard calendar. We’re now going to make that the standard calendar for our current building project and then we’re going to look at some of the consequences of that. We also still need to add the rest of the public holidays to that calendar. So let’s get started.

So first of all, let’s go to the Project tab and then on the Project tab in the Properties Group click on Project Information. Now when you click on Project Information, you’ll see that the calendar in force is still the standard calendar. So I’m going to change that now to be the building calendar. Click on OK and the calendar that I’ve selected there is now effectively the base calendar for this project.

Now you may have noticed a slight change to the schedule there and the slight change to the schedule there is because the resources that are currently scheduled to work on the project, that’s basically the brick layer and the carpenter, because their calendars are still based on the original standard calendar will not be fully available to this project during the hours of work on this project because they still have as their calendars the 8 to 5 hours, whereas the building calendar is basically on the 9 to 6 hours. Now basically the majority of people working on this project will be working to the same hours as the project itself. So let’s go in and look at those individual resources and make sure that we’ve got their calendars setup correctly.

So I’m going to use the button on the status bar at the bottom to switch to the resource sheet, and then on the resource sheet I’m just going to double click on brick layer. Open up the Resource Information for brick layer, and in terms of working time if I click on Change working time for brick layer, I’ll see that the resource calendar for brick layer is currently set at the standard calendar. Now I want to change that to be the building calendar. Now I can’t emphasize enough that the only reason I’m having to do that is because I didn’t set that up before I started. If you set your calendar correctly before you start scheduling tasks and resources, then you won’t need to go through all of this. Having said that, at least I’m doing it early on in the process so I’m aligning everything before I’ve entered too much information into my project.

So for the brick layer the default working week is the one on the calendar building calendar. So click on OK. That will have now corrected the working time for brick layer and then if I do the same for the carpenter who is my other work resource, again click on Change working time and his calendar is based on the building calendar as well.

Now again I should point out here that although the resource calendar for carpenter has as its base calendar, the building calendar if I wanted to put some exceptions for the carpenter, I could do them here. The exceptions for working time for carpenter, for instance, would be things like the carpenter’s vacations. If the carpenter is going to take a couple of weeks off, I can actually record that as an exception here. If the carpenter, for instance, has to go to the dentist one day, I can actually put a two or three hour exception in here. So you can define exceptions for individual resources. Click on OK, click on OK again, and now I’ve corrected the calendars for the two work resources, the brick layer and carpenter, and they’re the only ones I’ll need to do. And from now on any work resources that I add will have their calendars based on the new building calendar and not on the original calendar. So I won’ have to go through this process again.

So now I’m going to go back into the Project tab, Change working time, and look again at the building calendar which is now marked as project calendar. You can see the two exceptions I’ve got there, Easter Monday and Christmas. And what I now need to do is to add the rest of the public holidays for this year. Now if you are actually following this course in a subsequent year beyond 2013, then I hope you can adapt this accordingly. But the next thing for you to do is to add the rest of those public holidays. Add them for the year that you’re following this course in which might be 2013, it might be 2014, 2015. And where you have a holiday that can be repeated, probably on an annual basis, something like Christmas day or any other day that’s a fixed date in the year, then schedule it up to 2020. You could schedule it even farther if you want to but schedule it to at least 2020. Now I appreciate that depending on your locale your public holidays may be different. I’ve actually put two U.K. public holidays there. There’s a