Hello!



New member here. First I want to apologize for being your typical "I expect help on my first post" user. I used to be a member of another office forum that I'm having trouble finding. (Maybe it's gone.) I would really appreciate any help, and I'll do my best to "pay it forward" in this forum.



Here is what I am trying to accomplish. I would like to compare planned versus actual completion. I want one column that calculates planned completion as a percentage that changes based on the project Status Date, and a second column that allows the user to manually enter actual completion percentages.

The first column would easily be accomplished using the standard % Complete field. Changing the project status date causes the values in this field to update automatically. Perfect.

The second column, however, seems to be a bit trickier. My initial thought was to use a Text field. The problem with this approach is that the percentages don't roll up to the summary task levels. And of course, if it did roll up, I wouldn't want it to just be an average of all the percentages within the task grouping. For instance, if Task A is five days long and marked 100%, and Task b is ten days long and marked 0%, the parent task completion shouldn't just be 50%. It should be 33%. So in short, I would like the roll-ups to be evaluated in a similar manner to the standard % Complete field, but I want to be able to manually enter the percentages for each task.

Do you know of any way to accomplish this? I am open to many ideas.

Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks!

Hi
Welcome to the forum.
First of all when you have task A as 5 days and task b as 10 days, and then mark task A as 100% complete the summary task DOES show 33% and NOT 50%, so not sure what your confusion is here.
Second can you post what you have done so far so we can have a look in more detail.
Tony(OTPM)

Thanks!

Right. This is true of the standard % Complete field, but for a custom Text field I'm not sure how to do this. I want to be able to manually enter task completion percentages in the Text field, and have those values roll up to the summary tasks. However I don't want the values in this field to automatically update whenever I change the project Status Date. So a summary task percentage should be based solely on the manually-entered percentages, and the overall durations, of the tasks below it.

Absolutely. Though I can't post the project plan I am working with (confidential), I have attached an example. In this example, you will notice two columns:

• % Complete (Planned):
  This is just the standard % Complete field, which updates automatically whenever I go to Update Project and pick a new Status Date. This functions just how I would like it to. The current status date in the Project Plan is 9/30, so the tasks' % Complete values are automatically updated accordingly.
• % Complete (Actual):
  This is a Text field, in which I have manually entered percentages at the task level. (As you can see, we are behind on Example Task 2.) I would like the percentages to roll up to the summary task. Is there a better field that would accomplish this? I want to make sure it doesn't automatically update the percentages whenever I go to Update Project and pick a new Status Date.

Does that all make sense?

Thanks!

Attached Files

ExampleProject.zip (24.6 KB, 76 views)

Hi
Unfortunately this cannot be done in Project.
Sorry I could not help further.
Tony(OTPM)

Thank you for your response. I do appreciate you taking the time to consider my request.

That is unfortunate. However, I have devised a somewhat rudimentary workaround. It works as follows:
- Enter manual "actual completion" percentages in the Text field I mentioned above
- Copy this column over to the % Complete field, which will automatically calculate completion percentages at the summary task level
- Copy this column back over to the Text field
- Re-set the Status Date so that the % Complete field is moved back to its original "planned completion" state, and the "actual completion" percentages are still stored in the Text field

It's not ideal, but it'll work.

I do have another question on a bit of a different topic, but I figure I will create a new thread since that may help other people who are searching for similar solutions on search engines.

Thanks again!

if I've got what you need, I'm using this one to compare Actual Vs Should......Hope it hekps you....

Saludos....!

Carlos

Sorry, wrong format....Here we go...

C

Attached Files

Actual vs Planned (to share).zip (39.4 KB, 134 views)

Thanks for posting. It appears you certainly understand what I'm looking for. I have been employing the solution I described above for the last few months, and while it's not the most intuitive method, it does serve the purpose.

Anyway, I tried opening up your file and it appears that updating the date only works once. What I mean is, the first time I change the Status Date, the values in the "% Complete Should" column update accordingly. However, any further changes to the Status Date do not affect the "% Complete Should" column. Any idea why?

Changing status date does not automatically update actual values. If you want to update as of the Status Date, run the "Update Project" command to automatically set the actuals as scheduled.