Manual and Automatic Scheduling in Microsoft Project
Project has two different relationships between entered values and the scheduling engine. Manual scheduling preserves more of what the planner types; automatic scheduling calculates dates from the plan’s structure.
Manual scheduling
Section titled “Manual scheduling”A manually scheduled task can keep blank or descriptive values such as “sometime soon” in its duration, start, or finish fields. Its position is not automatically recalculated from constraints or calendars in the same way as an automatically scheduled task. A dependency link can position it when the link is first created, depending on project settings, but later changes to the predecessor do not automatically move the manual task.1
Manual scheduling is useful while estimates are incomplete. It is also easy to mistake preserved text or dates for a calculated schedule. For the task-entry context, see Create and Edit Tasks.
Automatic scheduling
Section titled “Automatic scheduling”An automatically scheduled task needs recognizable scheduling information. Project applies dependencies, constraints, calendars, resource information, and task type to calculate dates. Changing one input can move downstream work.
Switching an informal manual task to automatic can replace incomplete values with Project defaults. Review the resulting dates instead of assuming that the old entered position remains meaningful.
For the desktop calculation model, see How Microsoft Project schedules tasks.
Choose a scheduling mode
Section titled “Choose a scheduling mode”In desktop Project, select the task or tasks, then choose Task > Schedule > Manually Schedule or Task > Schedule > Auto Schedule. To set the default for new tasks, choose Task > Schedule > Task Mode, then select Manually Schedule or Auto Schedule.
In Project Plan 365, change a task’s mode in the Task Mode field or through Task > Task Information > General > Schedule Mode. Set the default for new tasks separately through File > Options > Schedule > New tasks created. See Project Plan 365’s Task Mode instructions for those steps.