[songbac]

I recently started using OmniPlan and would love to get some help around the duration field.

Part of my project is date driven, so I have set a bunch of milestones and then create tasks that essentially depends on the previous task and have a Finish-Finish dependency with a milestone.

Now I am stuck with one of the tasks just won't adhere to the 2 dependencies, i.e. starting after the end date of the previous task and ends on the same date as the milestone (with which it has a FF dependency). Instead, it somehow picks up some arbitrary duration value which I cannot clear.

Any help?

[whpalmer4]

Are there any resources involved? How about a set of pictures of the Task inspector for the offending task, showing task information, dependencies, and assignments? Or can you make a small test document and post it? The other thing I would recommend would be to use Help->Send Feedback to send an anonymized copy of your document to the support ninjas and ask them to have a look.

[songbac]

Thanks for replying whpalmer4. I have attached 2 screen captures of the offending plan (anonymized, learned something :)).

Task 14 is the offending task. Currently it thinks it has a 1 day duration even though factoring in the dependencies, it would have been more like 8 weeks. I don't want to have to calculate the duration for every task if I have already set up milestones and preceding tasks.

Maybe you can spot what is wrong right away. I can't imagine I am doing something exotic... Thanks!

[Lizard]

If I understand correctly, you want this task to run as long as possible, filling up all the time between the end of task 13 and the end of task 5? OmniPlan doesn't actually allow for this (yet?). It only deals with tasks whose duration is known (or calculatable from effort and resource assignments).

So task 14 is behaving exactly as I'd expect. Its end date is after task 5's end date, and its start date is after task 13's end date. 1 day is the default duration for any task whose duration hasn't been set to something else.

If this is what you meant, please send a feature request email to omniplan@omnigroup.com, requesting this. And what would you call these sorts of tasks.

(On the other hand, if I've completely misinterpreted, please try explaining again, either here or in an email to us.)

[songbac]

Thanks. You hit the nail on the head. I also got a reply from another team Omni team member on this question. My understanding is that this is called a "Hammock Task" which is not yet supported in OmniPlan but is coming in the next major release.

That's good enough for me for now. It is annoying to have to manually adjust the start and end dates but at least I now know it is not something in my head. It is the software. :)