Microsoft Project Tips Weekly

- [Instructor] Hi, I'm Bonnie Biafore. One scheduling best practice is that no incomplete tasks should have negative float. In this tip, I'll show you how to find incomplete tasks with negative float, so you can plan to get them back on track. Let's start by opening the file for this movie. In this case, I see the Planning Wizard dialog box, and it's telling me that there's a scheduling conflict. If you see this dialog box, go ahead and select the Continue option, which will allow the scheduling conflict to occur. We're going to deal with it a little bit later. Then click OK to open up the file. Negative float means a task is behind schedule, and it can't actually meet the date constraint or deadline that's been set. So let's scroll to the end of the project and see where the problem lies. When I get to the end of the project, you can see that there's negative float up to the final inspection. So there's a date constraint. It's set to August 23rd. So the schedule is not meeting that date constraint, and that's why we see this negative float in the Total Slack column. Remember that slack and float mean the same thing. Well, let's create a filter so that we can find the tasks that we want to look at, that is, tasks with negative float or slack that are incomplete, because you can't do anything about the complete tasks. I'm going to go to the View tab, and in the Data section in the Filter box, I'm going to click the down arrow, and then choose New Filter down near the bottom of the dropdown menu. In the Filter Definition dialog box, I'm going to name this filter C_negfloat. Now that I have it named, let's set up the tests. So I'm going to start with the first field name, and what we want is tasks that have total slack that is less than zero. So that means it's negative. But we also want incomplete tasks. In the second row, I'm going to choose the And test, and the field we want is % Complete, and that's going to be is less than 100%. So let's click Apply to apply this to the list. Now I see all of the tasks that are still incomplete that have a negative value in the Total Slack field. Well, to get the schedule back on track, let's say you talk to the team and you come up with some ways that you can adjust the schedule to get this thing back on track. So we're going to go down to the task number 36 to frame new walls. Actually, before I do this, up on the View tab, let's go to the Split View section and turn on the Details checkbox to display the task form. Now when I do that, I can see that the duration for framing new walls is four days. The team has said that they can do that in three, so we're going to click the down arrow to change it to three days and then click OK. We're going to do the same thing for framing the roof. We're going to change that from five days to three days and click OK. And let's say we go to task 39 to close in the roof. We're going to reduce that to three days. And finally, for good measure, we've got task 43, and we're going to change that to four days. Well, now let's see where we stand when it comes to negative float. At this point, I'm going to reapply the filter. Now one way you can do that is to go up to the Filter box in the ribbon, click the down arrow, and choose that filter again. But there's a keyboard shortcut, and if you don't know about it, it saves a lot of time. Just hold down the Shift key and press F3, and that reapplies the filter. When I do that, I can see that now the filter doesn't show any tasks. So that means we've gotten rid of all of the tasks with negative float. I'm going to go back up to the Filter box, click the down arrow, and choose No Filter to see the entire list. And I'm going to scroll down to the end of the project, and we can see that the total slack is zero days at the end. So the schedule is meeting the date constraint for this final inspection. And that's how you find incomplete tasks with negative float, so you can plan how to get the schedule back on track.