Project 2007: How to Customize a Calendar for a Specific Task

While it is important to see the big picture of your project working on a master timeline, it is also important to keep track of the individual tasks that make up your project and be aware of their schedules. Certain tasks may be dependent on third party holiday hours that your company doesn’t share, or you might be relying on a process that runs on hours that your team doesn’t.

To handle both macro and micro timelines, you need to know how to manipulate individual task calendar data in Project. Here’s how you do it:

1. Start by opening your project and highlighting the task you want to edit the calendar for.
2. Select the “Change Working Time” option from the Tools drop-down menu. From the Change Working Time dialog box, select the “Create New Calendar” button found in the top right corner.
3. A new window will appear titled “Create New Base Calendar.” In the name field, customize the name of the task timeline and decide if you want to create a totally new calendar, or clone another one and edit it.
4. Click OK.
5. Back in the “Change Working Time” dialog box, define the specifics of your timeline by selecting the “Work Weeks” tab and hitting the Details button.
6. A smaller, pop-up window will appear and from here you will be able to edit the work time available for that task for each day of the week in detail. For example, if your task can only be worked on for two hours on Friday morning, you can select “Friday” from the day list on the left and toggle the radio buttons to “Set Days to these Specific Working Times.” In the small grid below, enter the start time of work on the left column and the end time of work on the right. Remember that you may select multiple days at a time using the CTRL key. Also, default work times for traditional week days (Monday-Friday) are scheduled as 8am-12pm, 1pm-5pm. The two other radio buttons available are “Use Project default working time for these days,” and “Set Days to Non-Working Time.” The former will keep the 8am-5pm timeline, while the latter will block that day out from the task schedule and not count any work time on that day. You may repeat this process for all tasks in your project if necessary.