Custom fields in Visual Reports

Question

Hi,

I have a few issues regarding custom fields and visual reports. Since the issues I am encountering seem pretty basic, I assume that I am definitely missing something.

Scenario

I created a simple project with a custom field based on the Cost1 column. The name of the custom field is CustomField (quite original, I know). I checked the option for the custom field to be summed up in the parent task (I am unsure about the name of the option in the English version of MSP).

A quick illustration of the example project: http://www.tiikoni.com/tis/view/?id=35f4542

Then, I created a visual report. I obviously included the CustomField as a property to be viewable in the Excel Pivot Table.

Here is the result: http://www.tiikoni.com/tis/view/?id=d8521b9

Questions

1. How comes that my CustomField values do not get summed up in the Excel Pivot Table as they do under Ms Project? In MSP, I get a value of 15 next to task Parent 1, while I get 0 under the Excel report.
2. Similarly to question 1, how comes that the totals (Total Parent 1, Total Juin, etc.) cells are empty in the Pivot Table?
3. Why do I get the values 5 and 10 for Child 1/Parent 1 and Child 2/Parent 1 tasks for July 2013? I should have these values only for June in my understanding (since Parent 1 is finished in June).

Version: MS Project 2010 (14.0.6137.5000) SP1 MSO (14.0.6123.5001).

Thanks in advance to anyone who could give me a few pointers regarding these issues.

Regards,

Yves

Answer 1

Yves,

If you're looking for timescaled values for your custom cost field to appear in the pivot table, they won't. Custom fields are for static data only (i.e. non-timescaled). Why, because Project has no way of knowing how to spread custom field values over time.

Hope this helps.

John

Answer 2

Yves,

If you're looking for timescaled values for your custom cost field to appear in the pivot table, they won't. Custom fields are for static data only (i.e. non-timescaled). Why, because Project has no way of knowing how to spread custom field values over time.

Hope this helps.

John

John,

Thanks for the reply.

Somewhere inside me I was afraid to get that kind of answer. I really badly hoped no to, though.

That is really too bad. Especially since having time phased custom fields would be a great feature, in my opinion. Time scaling could be done the same way as for material costs (in resource management): proportional / begin / end of task.

I am afraid I will have to setup some ugly hack in conjunction with Excel to make this work.

Apart from this, I have to admit that MSP's visual reporting and its ability to export data to pivot tables is extremely useful.

Thanks again for the quick answer.

Regards,

Yves