I’m transferring someone elses project from Excel to MS Project. Essentially they want a Gannt chart where they can track progress. I have start and end dates for each task, but no duration.

Is there a way to tell Project to calculate the duration based on the start and end dates?

I’ve tried using Excel to caluclate the duration using NETWORKDAYS. But the numbers end up too big. i.e. I get a duration of 100 days when project things duration should be 50.

Any help gratefully received as it will get me out of the office on a
Sunday!

I don’t have Project with me today to check but surely you can simply the paste the start and end dates into those columns ?

I get a duration of 100 days when project things duration should be 50.

Just let MS Project do its thing, and take a 50 day holiday, surely?

I’ve paste the dates in. In sum cases it works, but in most in switches the tasks to manually scheduled and leaves the duration at 1d? Then I don’t get the all important bar on the Gannt chart

Change to auto schedule ?

It’s been a while since I’ve used MS Project. I’m sure there is a option to calculate duration or to allow the durations to calculate end date.

Otherwise, use excel, format cells for date and you can then add/ subtract between twobdates to give you a duration. Factor for 7, 6 or 5 days depending on working week.

Easiest way to do it is to paste the start date in and then increase the duration value until you get the right finish date.

How long is the plan OP. I can spare an hour this evening if is is up to a couple of hundred tasks.

Auto schedule everything, some dates will stick in manual but these will be underlined in red.

You can put the start and finish in manually, but that introduces a constraint (task must start/finish on). Obviously you may have a constraint, be it resource, regulatory or otherwise In which case this is fine but if this isn’t the case I think your best solutions has been suggested already without knowing why you want to do it like that.

As has been suggested, the easiest way will be to put your successors and predecessors against each task, set the first start date and then adjust durations until you get the finish date you want.

This is a slightly backwards way of scheduling it but without understanding what your trying to do and I it’s difficult to give any other suggestion. At least doing it that way (provided you have auto scheduled everything) you can easily track the project and any lead and lag will automatically adjust tasks accordingly.