Hi,

this post might be very boring! Because I am using the “Wedding” project I will put duration for each and every task! There are 100 task and I had to explain why I put those duration for each task. But, you know what? I won’t do it! I will show to you how can you put those duration to the tasks, and I will give you a link to my “Wedding” Project so, if you are interested in watching this example, just download it!

First I decided to change all task from manually schedule mode to auto schedule mode in MS PROJECT 2010. And I can do it with single step, instead of repeating 100 times the same thing for each task.

First I will select all my tasks:

and then:

and I will get:

All tasks are in auto schedule mode! They have 1 day duration, by default. What does the question mark means? It means that duration is estimated. I know what is on your mind now. You think: “But every duration during the Planning phase is estimated. We will know the exact information AFTER the work is done (so called ACTUALS)!”. And that is true! This question mark you might consider as: “estimate of a duration estimate”.

If you do not want to turn this future off follow these steps:

and then:

I keep these feature always on.

When you are adding the new task in auto schedule mode, you will have a default 1 day duration with question mark. But if you put manually duration in a duration field these question mark will disappear. If you want, for example, to change the default duration from 1 day to 6 days, but you still not confident with this estimation, and you want to keep the question mark put 6?, and you will get:

If you want to see how did I estimate durations for my “”Wedding” Project, here is the link:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/35142216/The%20wedding.mpp

In my next Post I will set up dependencies, and I will show you where are the mistakes in my task list.

Give me any comment you like.

Regards!