Hi,
it is Friday, and this post will be a short one!
Suppose that you have a project with 5 tasks as is shown in the picture:
Task 3 has a 3-day duration, and will start on Monday, 25.04.2011 and finish on Wednesday, 27.04.2011. What if your task can be done in 3 days but it must (for any reason) be scheduled on Monday 25.04.2011 then Thursday 28.04.2011 and finally on Tuesday, 03.05.2011.? You can make three different tasks but this is not a good idea. A better approach is to split the task. Here is how con you do it:
After you click on Split button move the cursor on the Gantt chart and click on Tuesday, 26.04.2011 and drag the task on Thursday 28.04.2011:
and you will get:
You can see that duration of task 3 is unchanged but the start date and end date was changed for Task 4 and 5 because Task 3 is predecessor of Task 4 and Task 4 is predecessor of Task 5.
Now I will split the same task so the last day is Tuesday 03.05.2011 and I will get:
Again, duration of task 3 is unchanged but the start date and end date was changed for Task 4 and 5 because Task 3 is predecessor of Task 4 and Task 4 is predecessor of Task 5
What if you change your mind? You can “resplit” the task in the same way. Click on the split task back until it is connected again (drag from right to the left):
And the task is joined again.
Remember that a dotted line does not represent duration. Nothing is happening in the dotted line period. If you want to remove dotted line you can do it like this:
and you will get:
You can see that a dotted line is removed. This picture on the Gantt chart is little confusing because you have a task with a 3-day duration that will start on Monday 25.04.2011 and finish on Friday 29.04.2011. Without a dotted line you can think that this is an error, so I strongly suggest: Leave a dotted line in your Gantt chart.
I have got a question: “Is it possible, for example, Link Predecessor Task, as Finish to Start relationship, with second, or third part of Task has s Slip?”. The answer is NO! Why, because it is ONE TASK, not two or three of them. If you have to do that, you should create two of three different tasks!
From my next post I will start to examine what would happen if I add or remove additional resources to the same task, different Task types, and how to understand this.
You should expect the Headache!
Have a nice weekend!
Nenad Trajkovski 
Very helpfull
Very helpful, Thanks!
I split the original task and want to link from within the split out to the new task back to the remaining part of the split task
It is inposible. It is one Task!
Dear Nenad,
I defined a cost resource “Hotel” and a work resource “Thomas” with hourly rate of 50 USD. For both of these resources I selected the accrue at “Start”.
I defined a task of 1 day duration and assigned Thomas to it. I also assigned 200 USD of Cost Resource “Hotel” to this task. Then I saved the baseline with baseline cost of 600 Dollars.
When I make the task 50% complete, the Actual Cost only shows the Cost of work resource. Even when the task is 100% complete, the actual cost only reflects the cost of work resource.
The behavior remains same even if the accrual method is changed to “Prorated” or “End”.
Can you suggest a work around?
Regards
Lalit Jain, Dubai
LALIT@KAUTILYAPROJECTS.COM
I will writ a Post about that today, 20.05.2013!