From the course: Managing Time-Constrained Projects with Microsoft Project

Making tasks automatically scheduled or manually scheduled - Microsoft Project Tutorial

From the course: Managing Time-Constrained Projects with Microsoft Project

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Making tasks automatically scheduled or manually scheduled

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- In Microsoft Project, in a time constraint project, you may want to set up the project file to work as you plan. So I've gone to the File ribbon and selected Options and on the File Options, I'm going to select Schedule. Now out of the box, Microsoft Project comes at, with Manually Scheduled tasks. You want to change that to Auto Scheduled that way I can utilize the scheduling engine throughout the remaining part of the project. I'll press OK. Now, you may want to also see that in the display so I'm going to right click on the Task Name column and I'm going to insert the Task Mode column. This will give me a visual task by task display for whether they're auto scheduled or manual scheduled. Now, I want to change all the tasks within the project plus I also noticed that I currently have some task constraints on various tasks throughout. Since the project is going to start on July 6th, I want to be able to move all this work to start as of July 6th. I'm going to click on the Task Name column and select Auto Schedule in the Task ribbon which will move all tasks to the Auto Schedule mode. I'm also going to select the Information option on the Task ribbon and change the constraint type under the Advanced tab to As Soon As Possible, removing any task constraints that currently exist within the project file. Now since I want to change this project to start as of July 6th, I'll go to the Project ribbon and select Project Information. In the Start area, I'll put in my start date of July 6th 2015. You can also select this from the drop-down and pick off the calendar. I'll press OK. I now can see that all the work starts as of July 6th and moves throughout the remaining months, depended on their dependencies. Lastly, I'd like to show the Project Summary tasks so I can get an overview of the complete summary. So I'll do that by going to the Format ribbon and selecting the Project Summary checkbox. Now, since I no longer need the Task Mode column, I can hide this column by right clicking on it and selecting Hide Column.

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