Reporting or analysis

Frederick
Thank you for your question. One option you may want to experiment with is to compare current finish dates with Deadline dates you have previously set.

You can add the Deadline column to any table by right clicking (perhaps on the Finish Date column), choosing insert column and selecting Deadline. You can then compare dates to see if the Finish is approaching its deadline.

With a lot of tasks this gets tricky so you might want to get MS Project to work this out for you. We didn't talk about this on our training day so here are some steps you might want to try:

First go to the Format ribbon and choose Custom Fields then switch to the Number field type.

Select Number1 field and set its formula to something along the lines of:

IIf([Deadline]>2^30,0,ProjDateDiff([Finish],[Deadline])/480)
NB unlike Excel you don't need to add the equal symbol to the start of your formula. Project does this for you and will complain if you add one too.

This formula does several things:

IIF is an IF function. It tests to see if the Deadline for a task is greater than 2 to the power of 30. I can only speculate as to why MS Project requires you to use this number to see if your Deadline field is empty but it does.

If Deadline is empty then the formula returns 0, avoiding an irritating #error message in your table.

If there is a date in your Deadline field ProjDateDiff works out the difference in working minutes between the Deadline and the Finish. Yes I did say minutes. This means we then need the last step which is to convert the working minutes into working days.

We do this by dividing the result by 480. (There are 480 working minutes in an 8 hour day – another fact for one of those MS Project cocktail parties!)

In your table you can now apply a filter to your Number1 column to only show tasks where the variance is greater than 0 and less than (say) 5 which would show tasks finishing one working week or less away from your preferred end date, where it has been set.

Project doesn't generate and alert but perhaps this would make a useful report to be printed regularly through the life of the project.

I hope this is helpful as a starting point – sorry it’s a bit convoluted. Let me know how you get on and if you have any further questions. I should emphasise this is one way of tackling the question, I dare say there are others!

Kind regards,
Andrew