CONTROL THE CALCULATION OF CRITICAL TASKS

 Once Project newbies see a critical field or a different color given to critical tasks in the Detail Gantt View, they often want to know how they can make a task critical. Actually, they're mistaking critical for a sort of task Priority field when it's really part of the critical path method for scheduling projects. In this tip, we'll explain how users can affect how Project decides which tasks are critical.

While users cannot decide which tasks are critical (Project calculates that), users can have some say in how that calculation is performed on tasks. In the Tools | Options dialog box, there is a tab called Calculation. At the bottom of the dialog box are two settings that give users the chance to dictate how the critical path is calculated: Calculate Multiple Critical Paths and Tasks Are Critical If Slack Is Less Than Or Equal To. 

§          Calculate Multiple Critical Paths lets Project calculate a critical path for each individual network of tasks in a project, essentially making every task in the project critical. The default for this setting is unchecked.

§          Tasks Are Critical If Slack Is Less Than Or Equal To lets users decide how little slack a task needs to be calculated as critical. The default is 0, but users can change this to a different number. If users change it to 2, then any task with two days of slack or less will be marked as critical. This means that any task that changes the project's Finish Date if it were delayed two days or more gets marked as critical. This can be handy if users want to give themselves a little margin for error in their critical path.

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