From the course: Microsoft Project 2019 Essential Training

The difference between auto and manual scheduling

From the course: Microsoft Project 2019 Essential Training

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The difference between auto and manual scheduling

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- [Instructor] With Auto Scheduled tasks, Project automatically calculates task dates and duration which is a must for all but the smallest projects. With Manually Scheduled tasks, you can set task dates and flag missing information. Let's start by looking at how Auto Scheduled tasks works. So we have two tasks, Identify Requirements, and Draft Budget. Over in the Time Scale, you can see that they are linked, so Draft Budget is going to start after Identify Requirements finishes. Identify Requirements is scheduled to finish on February 7th, so Draft Budget starts the next week on February 10th, but watch what happens if I change the duration of Identify Requirements to 20 days. In the Duration cell, I'm going to type 20 d, and then press tab. Well that changes the finish date for the Identify Requirements task which means it also changes the start and finish date for Draft Budget. By the way, this light blue shading is called change highlighting, and it shows you all the fields that have changed when you make a change in your schedule. So that's how Auto Scheduled tasks work. Project calculates dates and duration for you. Now let's look at Manually Scheduled tasks. Manually Scheduled is like do it yourself scheduling. It comes in handy in several situations. One of them is when you don't have all the information you need. Suppose that you know that you have to have a task Review Requirements with management, but at this point, that's all you know, so we're going to create a new task for that. Now before we do that, let's head down to the Status bar, and you can see that it says New Tasks are manually scheduled. For now, that's what we want. So I'm going to go up into the table, and I'm going to click row five which is the task below where I want my new task. Then on the Task tab, I can click Task in the Insert section to insert a new task. Notice that the Task mode icon is different. It has a push pin and a question mark, so that means it's Manually Scheduled. Auto Scheduled on the other hand, is a blue bar with an arrow pointing to the right. So now let's name the task, and that's going to be Review Requirements with Management. Once I name it, I can press tab to go to the Duration cell. It's gonna be a one day meeting, so I type in 1 d and then press tab to go to the Start cell. Well, at this point, I don't know when this is going to start. I have to talk to the manager, so let's just add a note to say that I know I need the task, but I don't know when. So I add the note, and when I press tab, now I can see the note in the Start cell. Notice in the time scale, the task bar looks a little different. It's a teal color, but the ends are faded, and that's an indicator that you don't have dates assigned to this task. Well, let's say that a few days go by, and the manager gets back to you and says, "Hey, let's do this on February 24th," so I'm gonna type that date in the cell, and then press tab. Now, let's look at what happened. First, we had a duration and now we have a start date, so Project can calculate the finish date which is also February 24th. In addition, over in the time scale on February 24th, we see that the taskbar looks different than it did just a little bit before. It's a teal bar, but it has darker teal end caps, and that tells you that you do have specific dates for this task. That's a quick look at the difference between Auto Scheduled and Manually Scheduled tasks.

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