Ihab Saad – MS Project session 2 Calendars

All right, welcome to the second lecture in Microsoft Project. And

basically, in this lecture, we're going to learn about calendars.

What are calendars? How can we modify calendars? How can we add

calendars? How do we assign different calendars to different

activities and schedule the project accordingly. So basically,

a calendar shows how many work days do we have per week, what are

the working times, and so on and so forth. And then if we have any

holidays, or if any, if we have any non work days, whether they

are regular non work days, like, for example, Easter or the Fourth

of July or Labor Day and stuff like that, or if we have any

particular non work days for that particular project. So for

example, we're going to have a shutdown of a certain plant, or

we're going to have maintenance on certain equipment and things like

that, so we're not going to have work during that time.

The other issue is how to make a non work day a working day. So for

example, Saturdays and Sundays are usually non work days. What if we

have to work on a certain Saturday or a certain Sunday to allow for

the project to finish on time and things of that sort? So the first

thing that we're going to do is learn about calendars, and in

order to do that, we are going to go to project

and we are going to go to Change Working times.

So under Change Working time you have, you can see here that we

have a calendar, a standard calendar. I have gone already and

added a couple of non work days and so on. So the calendar shows

that we have five work days per week, Monday through Friday, and

then Saturday and Sunday are the non work days or the weekend. Here

at the bottom, we have something called exceptions. And here you

have the legend on the on the side that shows what's a working day,

what's non working and so on. And then here we have the exceptions,

if I want to designate a certain day as an exception, so if it is a

working day and I want to make it a non work day, or the opposite,

if it's a non work day and I want to make it a working day. So for

example, here we have Independence Day, the Fourth of July. I have

already added that, and the way to do that is quite simple. Let's say

I want to designate

april 11 as a non work day.

So I'm going to go here, and I'm going to call it

non work.

Of course, we have to give a certain reason for that, and I'm

going to enter the date,

which is, in this case, april 11. And now it has been designated as

a non work day. It's that simple,

if I go down, as you can see now, it has been shaded so it shows

that this is a an exception day, becoming a non work day.

The other way around is, if I want to make a Saturday, for example, a

working day, I can do the same thing here,

and I can call this

receiving

equipment,

if certain equipment is going to arrive on site on that day, and I

need someone to be there to receive that equipment. So now

that particular Saturday has been designated as a work day, which is

the exception from being a non work day.

Okay.

Now if I want to add a new calendar, let's say for my

calendar right now is a five workday per week. Let's say I want

to add another calendar, and I'm going to call it I am going to

create a new calendar

and I'm going to call it six day.

Basically this calendar is going to be a six working day per week,

and I'm going to make an exact copy of my standard calendar.

Instead of adding all the holidays and the non work days and so on,

I'm just going to make a copy, and then I'm going to modify that as

well. So I'm going to go to, okay, make a copy of standard Okay,

make changes? Yes, because we have not closed standard. So now it has

created a new calendar called six day. What I want to do now? I want

to designate Saturdays. All Saturdays as being work days. So

let's say the site works six days per week and the office works five

days a week. So any activity related to the site, I'm going to

assign it to this calendar six day, and any activity related to

the office or to certain other trades outside, I'm going to

assign to the five work day. So what I have to do now, instead of

going through every Saturday and designating it as a next.

Option. There's another easier way of doing that. I'm going to go to

work weeks,

and

I'm going to click here.

I'm going to click on options.

Now this shows here, the week starts on Monday, and the times of

work and hours per week and so on and so forth.

Now I'm going to go on Saturday. Click on Saturday. I

and I'm going to click on details.

Now it shows the seven days of the week. I'm going to click on

Saturday. So

this is going to apply from now on to all Saturdays in this calendar.

And I'm going to click on Set days to these specific working times, I

want to designate what is going to be the working time on Saturdays.

So we're going to make it a regular work day. So we're going

to start at 8am

two

is going to be

12.

Let's go back here, 8am

to

12. We're

going to make that PM,

and then after lunch, we're going to start at 1pm

two,

5pm

and hit OK.

And now, as you can see, all Saturdays became work days. So

this is the second thing that we new thing that we've learned today

we learned so far about how to modify an existing calendar, which

is the standard calendar, and then how to add non work days, and how

to convert a non work day into a working day. And then we learned

about how to add a new calendar, the six work day calendar, and how

to

assign, basically Saturdays as a working day. Now we're going to go

to OK,

and basically

I'll go now to task.

And what I want to do is assign Calendar Number two, the six

workday calendar, to certain activities. So whichever

activities are going to follow that calendar, they have to be

assigned to that calendar. Let's say I'm going to go to excavation

and site leveling.

This activity here, this task, and I'm going to click on information,

and

if I go to Advanced,

it's going to show me calendar. Which calendar is this activity

going to follow? I'm going to call the six day calendar

and hit OK,

and now it's going to show here, under the task indicators, that

this activity has been assigned to the calendar six day. So the

calendar six days assigned to the task.

Now that we've done that, we can do that to other activities as

well and so on. So basically, this is the end of the second lesson on

how to modify calendars and how to assign different calendars to

different activities. Well, see you next time in the next lesson.