Plan User Manual
CALCULATION SETTINGS AND PREFERENCES
Calculation/Storage Settings
•Calculation. May be set to “Automatic” or “Manual”. With the automatic setting whenever a change is made all effected tasks are recalculated. With the manual option the “Plan > Recalculate all” menu option must be used to recalculate all tasks when needed.
•Calculate from. A project can be calculated in one of two ways – you specify a start date and plan will schedule from this date to determine the project end date. Alternatively you can enter an end date and Plan will determine when each task needs to start in order to complete the project by the given date.
•Average work day. The average work day option defines the duration of one normal work day. This unit of work is used when entering work values. Typically this should be set to the length of an average working day, excluding any breaks.
•Work days per week. The number of working days in an average week. This is used when displaying week values.
•Tracking. May be set to “by %” or “by time”. With the percentage option actual work done is entered as a percentage of the work planned. The “by time” option allows work done to be entered in actual days and hours.
•Resource storage. Resources may be stored within the plan along with task details or may be stored centrally. Central storage allows resource data to be shared between separate project plans. Note that when using the shared option, only edit resource details in a single plan at a time. Also be aware that with the shared storage if you send a plan to another person the resource details will be missing from the plan file.
Plan application Preferences
•Task description. Controls the width of the task description column as a % of the default. Increase this if descriptions for tasks are long.
•Date format. Controls the date format used to display dates.
•Gantt holiday shading. This option controls the shading of holidays in the Gantt chart. If set to “Resource specific” any
•Dependencies in Gantt. Controls whether dependency lines are drawn between tasks in the Gantt chart view.
•Saved bars in Gantt. If set to “Yes”, two bars are drawn for each task. The top bar depicts the calculated start/end dates and the bottom bar represents the saved start/end dates.
The Gantt text button displays a dialog which controls the text that is displays at the ends of the task bars in the Gantt chart. Text can be displayed to the left and right of each task. It is also possible to display different text for normal tasks, summary tasks and milestone tasks.
The Gantt colours option allows the colours used by Plan to be altered.
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