Time units
Time units are the periods in which you can choose to draw and edit bar chart objects. For example, when first planning a project, you might want draw tasks in multiples of months or weeks, then when you want to define the tasks in more detail you might want to draw tasks in multiples of days or hours. Time units are also used when slicing histogram data.
A number of time units are provided by default. You can edit these default time units and create your own. For example, the standard working day is set to 7.5 hours but your standard working day may be 8 hours so you might want to change this default time unit.
You might want to create your own time units if you regularly work to irregular time periods. For example, if your team members work in periods of 40 minutes, you could create a '40 minutes' time unit. Or, if your company works to 10 hour shifts you could create a 'Shift' time unit of 10 hours, then you could plan in terms of shifts.
Most of the time units that are provided by default are self-explanatory. One default time unit, elapsed accounting period, relates to a 28 day period that starts on the start date of the project.
There are two types of time units - working time units and elapsed time units. Durations specified in working time do not include any non-working periods such as lunch breaks, weekends or holidays; durations specified in elapsed time include non-working periods. For example, imagine a working day of 09:00-17:00 with one hour for lunch. If a task with a working duration of six hours starts at 09:00, it will finish at 16:00 as no work takes place during the lunch break. So the task has an elapsed duration of seven hours, but a working duration of six hours.
When you define a working time unit, you link it to its corresponding elapsed time unit, and vice-versa. For example, you link weeks to elapsed weeks and months to elapsed months.
You can exclude time units from the Snapping Time Unit dropdown list, which you use to specify the time unit to which new tasks should snap when drawn in the bar chart. By excluding time units that you never use for this purpose, this makes it easier to find the unit you want in the dropdown list.
You can edit the properties of a time unit by editing options on the Time Unit Properties dialog. To access help for the Time Unit Properties dialog, press F1 while viewing the dialog.