Microsoft Project Recurrung Task
If you need a regular reminder instead of a full-blown repeating task, set the recurring task’s duration to zero. That is, make the recurring task a milestone. Find recurring tasks. When you create a recurring task, Project automatically renumbers the task IDs and puts a recurring task indicator in the Indicators column. In Microsoft Project 2010 and 2013, there are actually two different methods for creating a summary task. The first method is the one used in all previous versions of the software, while the second method is a new feature introduced in Microsoft Project 2010.
Course Info
- Duration:5h 3s
- Skill Level:Beginner + Intermediate
- Released:April 18, 2013
- Viewers:44,782
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Ms Project Recurring Task Resources
Course details
Follow along with author Bonnie Biafore as she shows you how to better manage your project's deadlines, tasks, and resources with Microsoft® Project 2013. This course covers setting up project files, creating tasks, assigning resources, working with views, and using baseline calculations to track progress. Plus, learn how to report project information and share it with others.
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The PMI Registered Education Provider logo is a registered mark of the Project Management Institute, Inc.Skills covered in this course
Course Transcript
A recurring task is work that occurs on a regular schedule. In Project you can set up a recurring task by giving project the basic info about the frequency and other settings. The program then creates the individual occurrences and a summary task to hold them all. In this case, we're going to add a recurring task right before the Design Space task. So I scroll down and select the Design space task and then on the Task tab I click the bottom half of the Task button in the Insert section. On the dropdown menu choose Recurring Task. The Recurring Task Information dialog box opens and the first thing you do is name the task. So let's say, it's a Project review. You can see the Duration is set by default to one 1 day; that's the duration of a single occurrence. So in this case, it's a review meeting so I'll change that to 2 hours. The next section Recurrence pattern basically tells Project when this task is going to reoccur. Now one thing to keep in mind is that you want to keep recurring tasks to a minimum, and one of the reasons is it makes it really hard for Project to level resource assignments when you have recurring tasks. So if you have something that recurs really frequently, like on a daily basis, instead of doing a recurring task you might actually be better off just including that time in your regular work tasks, just add the time for those daily reviews into the tasks for the work you do everyday. But in this case, we're going to do a Monthly project review. So it will be fine. Well if you do a daily recurrence pattern, you can tell it how many days you want to do every say four days or if you do Weekly, you can tell it which days of the week may be a Monday and a Wednesday and we'll do it every two weeks, or for our monthly project review, choose the Monthly option. And in that case you can tell it which day of the month, such as the tenth, or you can set it to be something like The Second Wednesday. If you are going to do a quarterly meeting you could actually change this to every three months, but we're going to do this monthly. So we'll leave it at 1. Yearly is very similar to monthly. Now the next section, Range of recurrence, that's when it starts and when it finishes. Well you can see it starts here at the project start date, which is perfect, and it actually ends by the project End date. So in this case, I'll leave it just the way it is. But the other option is you can choose a different date if you want or you can tell Project that you want a certain number of occurrences. In that case you select the End after option and tell it how many times you want it to happen. So then I click OK and Project adds all the individual occurrences, as well as the summary task to hold them. So you can see the individual occurrences have day constraints because they're set for specific days. You can also see that the summary task has this indicator two arrows pointing at each other and that means that's a recurring task. And if you point at that indicator, it tells you how many times it occurs and the start and finish. Well, if you don't want to see rows for all the subtasks you can click this black triangle and collapse the summary task, and over in the timescale, you can see little tiny task bars for each of the Project review occurrences. If I click the white triangle to expand the summary task, now I can see all the individual occurrences; and over in the Timescale, you can see them in the summary task, and you can also see the ones for the individual occurrences. One thing to keep in mind is that the dates don't change automatically if your project gets longer. Well, let's say that the project was delayed. Project is not going to automatically extend this recurring task to include additional occurrences. So you would have to create a new task for the additional occurrences. Creating a recurring task is an easy way to set up several individual tasks that recur on a regular schedule.
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