Working with calendars
Calendars determine the dates on which tasks can be worked. A calendar is a record of working periods such as the working week and overtime, and non-working periods such as holidays and weekends. Working periods with a calendar are defined by shift sequences, or work patterns. A work pattern is a sequence of working hours, or shifts. For example, your default work pattern may be a seven day work pattern starting on Sunday, where Saturday and Sunday are non-working periods and Monday to Friday have working periods of 09:00 - 13:00 and 14:00 - 17:30.
Calendars can have different work patterns at different times of the year. For example, a calendar for a large-scale construction project may have a winter pattern and a summer pattern, with the summer pattern having longer working days to take advantage of the extra daylight.
You can assign calendars to tasks as well as resources. If you assign a resource with one calendar to a task with a different calendar, you can choose whether the task should work according to its own calendar or that of the resource. Each task on a bar can be assigned a different calendar. If you have two tasks on the same bar, one of which is worked during the day and the other is worked during the night, you can assign a different calendar to each task to represent this.
As different people and different countries have different working patterns, you may need to create several calendars, each with different working and non-working days.
Examples of where different calendars can be useful
- Work on a project is carried out in more than one country, in which public holidays are different.
- Work on tasks is carried out by different people who take their holidays at different times.
- You want to experiment to see whether working overtime on a task will help to meet a deadline.
Setting up calendars that reflect working patterns accurately makes project plans more accurate, as work is not scheduled to be carried out during non-working time.
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