Luka Gospodnetic - Microsoft Project 2007 Blog

Changing the project calendar / custom working times

A lot of people are having trouble changing the calendar for their project in MS Project. Most common problems are:

• they create a new calendar but they don’t  select it as a project calendar
• they create a new calendar but the week still starts with Sunday
• they create a new calendar during the project and the task that are already entered still have the default calendar

Those are just a few examples, but no point in blabbing about problem when I could talk about the solution J

1. Tools->Change working time
2. You can choose from one of predefined calendars or create a new one from scratch or based on an existing calendar. Let’s click on the Create new calendar button
3. Enter a new name for the calendar and click on Create new base calendar
4. In the Exceptions tab you can enter holidays in your country, your company’s holidays or a predicted earthquakeJ. After you enter an exception you can set working time and reoccurrence of this exception by clicking on the Details button.
5. In the Work Weeks tab you can set numerous periods, with different working times. By clicking on the Details button you can set the working hours for each day (Sunday to Saturday)
6. Now we can set Monday as a first day of the week and default time values by clicking on the Options button. One thing that you should be aware of (it is really strange J) is that when you enter a task duration in, for example days the MS Project will take the value that equals Number of days * Field Hours per day. So you have to remember that when you enter date without time the MS Project will not calculate these values but it will use them from Option dialog (Calendar tab).
7. Project->Project information – here you must select the new calendar as a projects default calendar