
See 'No resources or generic resource descriptions' in top 10 ms project mistakes. Warning sign Generic terms like ‘Supplier’ or ‘Developer’ should be clarified and ideally replaced with a named resource. Predecessor, a task that links to it, and a.To calculate the end date of your project and to understand the Critical Path each task should have a: Predecessors, aka task links or dependencies, are very important in project planning. In the task table there should also be a column for Predecessors and one for resources. You can check for constraints by looking for this symbol in the indicator column. When a start or finish date is set by the Project Manager a constraint will be set. I mentioned constraints earlier - constraints fix a task’s start or finish to a particular date. The Project Manager should avoid entering start and finish dates manually as they will interfere with the calculation of the project end date.

These are automatically calculated by MS Project using the task duration, working times, resource allocation and task dependencies.

The Start and Finish date columns follow the Duration column. Warning sign Look out for ‘1 day?’ this is the default duration so you will want to check if it is correct. For example if a task has notes associated with it or contains a hyperlink. Next to it is the Indicator field, which is used to show information about a particular task. The gray column at the far left is the unique identifier for each task, similar to the row numbers in Excel. This view shows the project tasks as bars mapped to a calendar. On the right hand side is the Gantt Chart view, named after Henry Gantt.There may be additional columns, but these are the key areas.

Running from left to right you should see columns for tasks, duration, start and finish dates and resources.
