MS Project Grayed out project date

[Sean]

I'm fairly new at MS Project. The trouble I'm having is
that in my Project file the Duration has a ? mark after
the number of days. MS Project won't allow me to adjust
the Finish date. This happens throughout the project where
I have a task with subtasks. There appears to be a
relationship somewhere, but I'm not seeing it.

Any assistence would be very helpful. Thanks.
Sean

[Jan De Messemaeker]

Hi Sean,

The ? only indicates that you did not explicitly change the duration, so
Project warns you that it *might* be only an estimate. It does not influence
any calculation.

Furthermore, first a word of advice.
One should NOT, NOT EVER, enter a finish date ANYWHERE in Project.
I consider the fact that it is not always greyed out to be a product
weakness.

This being said, Finish dates for elementary tasks are calculated from start
plus duration, and finish dates for summary tasks are the finish date of the
latest of the subtasks.

Finally - you really don't have to be ashame for reading a book or going on
a course prior to using Project...

HTH

--
Jan De Messemaeker
Microsoft Project Most Valuable Professional
Project Management Consultancy
Prom+ade BVBA
32-495-300 620

Post by Sean
I'm fairly new at MS Project. The trouble I'm having is
that in my Project file the Duration has a ? mark after
the number of days. MS Project won't allow me to adjust
the Finish date. This happens throughout the project where
I have a task with subtasks. There appears to be a
relationship somewhere, but I'm not seeing it.
Any assistence would be very helpful. Thanks.
Sean

[John]

Sean,
I'm sure you'll get more than one response on this post. First, you
cannot directly enter Duration or Start or Finish dates on a summary
task (i.e. a Task with subtasks). Those values are calculated by Project
based on the data in the subtasks. Second, you generally do not want to
enter Start or Finish dates into a Project plan. In some cases entering
a Start date is appropriate but normally the start of a task is
determined by a logical link to a predecessor task. A finish-to-start
relationship is the default when you select two or more tasks and use
the "chain link" icon. The finish date of all tasks is normally
calculated by Project based on an estimated value entered in the
Duration field.

Hope this helps.
John