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Given an end date and the amount of hours I'm willing to spend per course (say 250 hours each for 2 concurrent courses), how do I make MS Project Professional 2019 spread out the courses evenly every day (say 4 hrs/course) given an 8 hour work day? I want to be able to determine when I need to start studying.

At the moment I'm only able to have the tasks in sequence.

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  • Have you considered using two 4 hours recurring tasks on a daily basis for 5/6 days?
    – Tiago Peres
    Commented Aug 3, 2019 at 9:17
  • Given that there is no dependency between the tasks, and no real reason to schedule the activity, I'm skeptical that Project is the right task.
    – MCW
    Commented Aug 5, 2019 at 10:35

2 Answers 2

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Here's an example of how to do this:

  • Create 2 tasks, one for each class, auto-schedule mode.
  • Assign yourself as a resource to teach task, but only 0.5 units (e.g. 4 hrs/day).
  • Set constraints on the tasks--choose one of the finish constraints such as Finish No Later Than or Must Finish On. This example shows the difference with these two types. The MFO is a hard constraint so the start date will be moved later to ensure the task doesn't finish early. The FNLT is a soft constraint and the task will start as soon as it can (in this case it will start on the Project Start date which defaults to the day the schedule is created.)

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Note that the work should be set to 250 hours which will change the duration to 500 hours because that is the amount of working time spanned when you only work 4 hrs a day on a task.

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  • Thanks. After further experiments this is approximately what I ended up with. Another complication came up that I didn't write initially: The courses aren't exactly overlapping, and on the days I only have one course I would like for it to expand to 100% of that day automagically, however I don't know if its possible in MSP.
    – saner
    Commented Aug 7, 2019 at 15:46
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You can use Resource Leveling option. In case resource is Over allocated it will automatically adjusts resource assignment based on availability. In case we have assigned resource with 50% allocation, while resource leveling it will not increase allocation to 100%. This is MSP feature.

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