Setting Duration to show in Days (or weeks) and not hours.

[DK]

Hi Guys,
Thanks for the support as I'm new with Merlin but a long time user of
OmniPlan.

In my business we don't put as much emphasis on resources or effort in
the planning stage, mainly just duration as we pull in the resources/
staff necessary to complete each task/activity and often give
ourselves a week duration to finish a 4 hour task.

After a lot of testing and reading the help file I think the best
column for me to use (out of the many, many columns dedicated to
DURATION) is "Given Planned Duration". This seems closest to
OmniPlan's "Duration" column. Am I correct? On the fly I need a quick
column that I can change based on feedback from my team how long each
activity is going to and/or should take.

I aslo don't want to see that column convert everything to hours as I
don't get down to the granularity and just want things in working days
or weeks (not calendar).

So in summary:

1. Is Given Planned Duration the best column for me to quickly update
how long in working days each task/activity is going to take?
2. How do I change the units to Days or Weeks, etc? ("Calculated
Durations" set to Days wont affect my Given Planned Duration units)

Thanks!

Dave

[Vicky Stamatopoulou]

Hi DK,

> Hi Guys,
> Thanks for the support as I'm new with Merlin but a long time user of
> OmniPlan.
>
> In my business we don't put as much emphasis on resources or effort in
> the planning stage, mainly just duration as we pull in the resources/
> staff necessary to complete each task/activity and often give
> ourselves a week duration to finish a 4 hour task.
>
> After a lot of testing and reading the help file I think the best
> column for me to use (out of the many, many columns dedicated to
> DURATION) is "Given Planned Duration". This seems closest to
> OmniPlan's "Duration" column. Am I correct? On the fly I need a quick
> column that I can change based on feedback from my team how long each
> activity is going to and/or should take.
>
> I aslo don't want to see that column convert everything to hours as I
> don't get down to the granularity and just want things in working days
> or weeks (not calendar).
>
> So in summary:
>
> 1. Is Given Planned Duration the best column for me to quickly update
> how long in working days each task/activity is going to take?

"Given Planned Duration" defines the planned duration for the task during planning. If the works on a task should have a fix duration no matter how many resources are assigned or not, you may enter this time in the "given planned duration". Yes.

To update the overall duration of a task (because the works on this task had been started and are in progress) you edit the actuals.
You can use the "actuals" tab or actual columns. So if the actual duration changes as soon as work takes place, you update the task in absolute mode, enter the amount of work performed in the task and the remaining amount of work.

[DK]

Thanks Vicky,

Your explanation is helpful. I guess there isn't a simple comparison
between how OmniPlan uses start and finish and duration to plan and
execute a project and how Merlin deals with them (as they are greyed
out and not editable).

In OP:
- until you click "Set Baseline" your "start" and "end" are able to be
used as planned, expected or actual dates. (In real life I may change
the duration of "task A" from 1 week to 2 weeks or vice versa. This
doesn't mean that any work has actually started)
- after you click "Set Baseline" your "start" and "end" are basically
actual (because you'll be able to still see what your original plans
were)
- "start and "end" are always editable in the outline even if set to
"as soon as possible"

I would like to be able to enter a date in the "planned start" (or any
other "start") column if I know I want to start a task on a specific
day. Right now I can drag the task in the gantt and the expected/
planned dates all change but you can't change them in the columns
(which I find counterintuitive - but it's just what I'm used to).

Overall I'm just feeling like more columns are greyed out and not
editable unless through the gantt or inspector.

Thanks for your help - I want to understand this new workflow so I can
switch over to Merlin for our new projects.

Dave

On Aug 9, 1:51 pm, Vicky Stamatopoulou <vi...@projectwizards.net>
wrote:

>  Merlin032.png
> 102KViewDownload
>
>
>
> If the expected duration doesn't change while works take place in the task, you can update the actuals in the percentage mode, and just enter a completeness percentage.  
>
>  Merlin033.png
> 105KViewDownload

>
>
>
> > 2. How do I change the units to Days or Weeks, etc? ("Calculated
> > Durations" set to Days wont affect my Given Planned Duration units)
>

> Given Durations stay in the unit you have enter them, or they were at the import time point.
>
>  Best regards, Vicky

[Clay]

HI

Im having a similar issue in regards to viewing time scales in
merlin. ive imported an xml file exported from omniplan. given
planned duration is shown in hours even though i entered them as days
in omniplan. is there a way to get merlin to show the time length as
days in the given planned duration column?

[DB]

Ditto.  I have a schedule that goes for 5 years with lots of activities and dependencies to set up.  But this is hard to do when the gnatt is laid out by individual days.  how do I toggle the gnatt between months, weeks and days?

If I could lay out activities & relationships in coarser units at first until I get a higher level schedule that makes sense, I can return later and refine with more temporal resolution.

[Clay]

From what ive found, it seems merlin can change time scales only in
the gantt chant, not in columns. But ive only beenusing it for a few
days now so others might know more

[Antoni]

Hello,

you can change the calculated durations in the columns in the Project
Settings of Merlin. Please open the General tab and then change the
option for the calculated durations from dynamic to the desired unit
(days, weeks, months etc.).

Thanks.

[Clay]

hi antoni

thanks for your post. thats sort of what im talking about. that
setting only changes the gantt chart or columns that cant be edited.
given planned duration does not get changed by that setting. is there
a simple column that you can enter a duration and then be able to see
it in either hours, days, weeks or months?

[Antoni Cherif]

Hello Clayton,

all editable columns with time units, are using custom time units. So if you type in "1 m" it will be 1 month. If you type 14 d it will be 14 days and so on. So these values will stay in the way you typed them in. Please also observe that we have two values for duration. The duration which is calculated on working time in the project (means the days you work f.ex. mondays to fridays) (1day is usually 8 hours of working time) or the elapsed duration which is our time (24h are 1 day). So if you type in 14 d it will be 14 days of working time. If you type in 14 ed it will be 14 elapsed days, which is 14 days with 24hours.

Coming back to your question. I would activate the expected column, so you can see you planned values for duration in the "Given Planned Duration" column and next to it I would use the "Expected Duration" column. Which uses the units you can set in the Project Settings.

I hope this helps you a little bit to understand how Merlin handles the times.

Thanks.
Antoni

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