Duplicate Tasks in Microsoft Project

Question

I am trying to replicate a task in two different sections of a MSP - basically my leadership team want to see a summary at the top of the project for key milestone deliveries but my fear is if the two tasks cannot be mirrored, the tasks on, for example line 277 could be changed and this would not be reflected on say line 12 in the high level summary?

An example of this would be on Line 277 (again, just for the example!) there is a Project level task named 'Build End' which is required in the 'Programme Milestone Summary' as an exact replica on line 12. Line 277 has an original start / date of 22nd but this date slips by 1 week to 29th. I want to be able to:

a) change Line 277 to the 29th which would automatically update Line 12 to reflect any change to date, title etc. on 277

And, if possible

b) lock line 12 so it cannot be changed?

Thanks

Keith

Answer 1

I can see what you are getting at. You want a list at the top where each task in the list is a duplicate of a task lower down somewhere in the list, and when you say "duplicate" you mean an exact and complete duplicate, meaning name, start, finish, % etc etc. Bear in mind that there are about 250 fields for every task, so an exact duplicate is a lot of overhead.

It could be accomplished by copy, paste special, link for every field you want to capture but this is fragile as well as just too much of doing it the hard way.

I think you are trying to find an answer to the wrong question.

Try approaching the problem from another direction, using the functionality that is already there for this purpose.

What I would do is use a spare flag field to tag the tasks you are interested in, and then filter on the field or group by the field, or sort by the field.

Answer 2

Link the finish of 277 to the milestone on line 12. The milestone summary task will self adjust if necessary.

You do not want line 12 to stay fixed. That is very poor practice. Instead you should save a Baseline so you can see the original date. The tracking gantt View shows baseline and current bars together.

Answer 3

Hi Rod,

What you described works fine for keeping the milestone summary date valid, but doesn't change the % complete. It would be great if when the % complete on line 277 (in this example) is changed, the % complete of line 12 also changes.

I also would like to see a way to duplicate a milestone as described by Keith.

Regards

Phill