Auto-scheduling Milestones Creating Issues

Question

Good afternoon,

I have a bunch of project milestones, past and present, that I'm trying to represent in MS Project using the Gantt Chart functionality. I currently have the milestones indented underneath the project title, with all milestones manually scheduled, like so: [![Snapshot of MS Project][1]][1]

The problem is, I want the milestones to appear as nicely labeled markers on the Gantt Chart. To get the labels to appear, I think I have to auto-schedule my milestones. When I switch to auto-scheduling, all of my dates freak out and it tries to make my project start date 10/7/2020.

Current Gantt Chart looks like this: [![gantt chart][2]][2]

I've tried to use the timeline functionality, but the 10 timeline limit is a big hindrance for me. Is there anything I can do to fix this issue? All the examples I find online deal with auto-scheduling tasks, not milestones. Thanks for your help! [1]: https://i.stack.imgur.com/0GJDo.png [2]: https://i.stack.imgur.com/mM4zT.png

Answer 1

I want the milestones to appear as nicely labeled markers on the Gantt Chart

I'm not exactly what defines "nicely labeled markers" for you but you can customize the text that appears to the right or left of shapes in the Gantt chart and the shape styles by right clicking anywhere in the white space in the Gantt chart and then clicking Bar Styles

This will open the Bar Styles form. From here you can customize the style for all elements that appear in the Gantt Chart, including manually scheduled tasks and milestones.

In my example, I'm setting the text to the right of my manual milestones to be the name field instead of the finish date field. Here's what that looks like:

When I switch to auto-scheduling, all of my dates freak out and it tries to make my project start date 10/7/2020.

When you switch everything to Auto Scheduled, it will cause your tasks/milestones to start once their driving predecessor finishes (in a nominal scenario, not factoring in other dependency types). If a task or milestone does not have any predecessors, it will start whenever the project's start date is. You can see/edit the start date of the project by clicking the Project tab --> Project Information

I want to stress that it's a best practice to schedule everything in Auto Scheduled mode, that way the schedule logic (predecessor and successor relationships) can drive dates of items in your schedule.