Adding Duration, Start time and End time (Understanding days vs edays)

You can manually enter the respective Duration, Start date or End date to the respective task. The duration can be marked with number followed by duration indicator like days or hours etc.

To enter duration in Hours you can enter h similarly for min (m), days (d) , or week (w) or y for years. Please note that to indicate months you have to enter as (mo) And not as (m) !

Some time you can enter? Next to duration, this indicates the values are estimated and may change.

Adding Duration to Task

As you can see the question mark on manual task disappears as soon as you enter the duration and either of start or end date.

In our project there is task to move the data from old machine database to new machine, the task is automated and will be done 24 X 7 and will be continue on holiday.  Your IT person expects this would need 240 hours approx. 10 days to copy data for last 10 years.

Project Schedule when duration is 240 hrs 

 If you enter the 240 hrs in duration MS project will schedule it for 6 weeks, this is because MS project assumed the task as 8X5 job with Sat, Sun as off. To tell MS project it as 24X7 job with no holidays change the 240 hours to 240 ehours !

Project Schedule when duration is 240 ehrs.

You will see the task will be now adjusted to 10 days!

When you indicate any duration with prefix e it is treated as elapsed time, you can indicate edays, eweeks and so on.   The Elapsed time as I mentioned earlier 24X7 with no holidays.