Setup Calendar

Even before you jump and start entering your task in project it is good idea to set up the project calendar, In fact it would be good practice to quickly setup the calendar as first thing in project.

Why setting the calendar is important? Because your schedule is depend on this and MS project automatically consider the off hours to reflect correct possible schedule.

To setup calendar, GO to Project Menu and click on Change working time button

Once you click on this Project will open “Change working time” window. 

Even though the first option on this window says “For Calendar” it has broad view. Ie. It refers how you work time and days. If you select the dropdown you will find three options.

24 Hours: Project assume that you are working in all three shifts 24 hours

Night Shift: Project assumes the project is executed in night shifts (12 hours X 6 days)

And lastly standard: means you work 8 to 5, 5 days a week.

You must manually maintain the leaves and working hour exceptions in this three calendar separately if you are using this calendar for any task or as resource calendar.

If you can see next to Standard calendar in bracket mentioned as project calendar, this is the default calendar used by MS project to calculate duration, this is the one we setup while we setup the project information.

Now let’s move to our scenario, we know that no one works on X-Mas and 1st of Jan every year. So we need to mark them as holidays so Project don’t schedule any task for this days.

To mark 1st Jan as holiday select 1st Jan in calendar and enter “New year” in Name column.

If your project is supposed to be executed for 10 years, you don’t need to manually select every 1st of January and mark this as non-working day, you can easily set the recurrence using recurrence.

To do so select the new entry row and click details, select the recurrence as “Yearly” and fill out the range using Start and End after or End by.

Similarly to mark multiple day as off (i.e. X-Mas off on 25th and 26th Dec) go to December month and select both dates and enter X-Mas in Exception Name column.