Creating and assigning a calendar

Creating and assigning a calendar

Goal: make a calendar of your own, for example a six-day work week, and give it to the tasks that must be calculated in it.

When you need this

A subcontractor also works on Saturdays. A crew works only Monday to Thursday. A task falls in a period in which only that task stands still. The project calendar then has the wrong work days. With a calendar of your own, the app calculates those tasks on the right days, and the rest stays on the project calendar. What the app does with a calendar exactly, you can read in Calendars and working days.

Steps

Creating a calendar

1. Choose Planning › Calendar › Calendar. The same button is on Settings › Calendar › Calendar. The Calendars window opens. On the left are the project's calendars; the project calendar has a star.
2. Under the list, click the button with the plus sign (New calendar). The new calendar is a copy of the standard: Monday to Friday, 07:00 to 16:00 with an hour's break and, if Construction mode is on, the Dutch public holidays. If you want an existing calendar as a basis, pick it in the list and click the button with the two sheets under the list (Duplicate).
3. Give the calendar a name under Name that says who uses it, for example Six-day week.
4. Under Work days, click the weekdays on or off. Mon–Fri restores the standard week, with 07:00 to 16:00. If the calendar has work blocks, Mon–Fri only switches on Monday through Friday and every day keeps its blocks. Continuous (24/7) switches on all seven days, from 00:00 to 24:00.
5. Adjust the working times if needed: Start (hour), End (hour), Break starts and Break duration (minutes). You type times as HH:MM; with the arrows you raise or lower them by a quarter of an hour. If you set the break duration to 0, the calendar works without a break. The app works out the Standard workday itself. If the calendar has working-time blocks per weekday (for example from MS Project), you do not see these fields but the Working times block, also with hour planning off; see Setting working times.
6. Adjust the holidays if needed. How that works is covered in Generating holidays and the construction holiday.
7. Click Apply. The app recalculates the schedule right away and closes the window. With Cancel you throw the changes away. Enter in an input field saves in between and also recalculates, without closing the window; Cancel then only undoes what you changed after that.

Giving a calendar to tasks

A new calendar only does something once a task uses it. There are two ways.

Via the Properties panel

1. Select the task. If you do not see the Properties panel, turn it on with View › Panels › Properties.
2. Under Task, choose the calendar in the Calendar list. The top choice, Project calendar with the name after it, means the task has no calendar of its own.

Via the right-click menu

1. Right-click the task, in the task list or on the bar in the Gantt.
2. Choose Assign calendar and then the calendar, or Project calendar to remove the calendar of its own again. The calendar that applies now has a tick.
3. If you want to give one calendar to several tasks at once, first select them with Ctrl (⌘ on a Mac) and right-click one of the selected tasks. The choice applies to all selected tasks. If you right-click a task that is not selected, it applies only to that task.

A new calendar choice does not make the schedule current yet: the status bar reports Out of date — recalculate (F5). Press Calculate (F5), for example via Home › Schedule › Calculate. If Calculate automatically is on (Settings › Project › App settings, tab Planning, heading Calculation), the app does this itself.

Switching the project calendar

1. Open Planning › Calendar › Calendar and choose the calendar in the list.
2. Above the form, click Set as project default. The star moves to that calendar.
3. Click Apply.

Only the tasks without a calendar of their own move along.

Deleting a calendar

1. Open the Calendars window and choose the calendar in the list.
2. Under the list, click the button with the bin (Delete). That button is disabled as long as there is only one calendar.
3. Click Apply. Tasks and resources that used the calendar fall back on the project calendar. If you delete the project calendar itself, the first calendar in the list becomes the project calendar.

Pitfalls and what the app does then

No work days. If you switch off all weekdays, the app cannot calculate. When calculating it reports The calendar has no working days set.

Invalid input. A break outside the working day, a start time after the end time or a holiday with an incorrect date gets a red message at the field, and Apply is disabled until you fix it. For an invalid break or holiday there is also a warning sign next to the calendar in the list (This calendar contains invalid input).

A calendar on a phase. A phase always calculates on the project calendar, because its duration follows from its tasks. Give the calendar to the tasks themselves.

The same calendar, two choices. In the list the project calendar appears twice: as Project calendar: name and as an ordinary calendar with that name. If you choose the second, that is a choice of its own for that task. The task then does not move along when you later choose a different project calendar.

Different hours per day. If you change the working times or the break so that the Standard workday of a calendar changes, a task in days still counts the same number of days. For a task with resources and the task type Fixed work or Fixed units, the duration does change with it, because the work stays the same. Forty hours of work is 5 days at 8 hours per day and 7 days at 6 hours per day. The app reports how many tasks got a different duration.

See also

• Calendars and working days: how the app counts work days and which calendar wins.
• Days and hours: what the standard workday does.
• Setting up a resource calendar: a calendar for a resource instead of a task.
• Calendar windows: all fields of the calendar windows.