Renumbering unique task IDs to reflect the order of tasks

Once unique task IDs have been generated, you can renumber the unique task IDs of the tasks within the current view, or of a selection of tasks. You may want to do this if you have created a series of tasks in a sequence other than the order in which they are to take place and you want to renumber the unique task IDs so that they reflect the order in which the tasks are to be carried out or the order in which they appear on the bar chart. You can also change the unique task IDs of a series of tasks by searching for an alphanumeric string within their unique task IDs and replacing it with an alternative string.

To renumber the unique IDs of a series of tasks to reflect the order of tasks in the bar chart:

  1. To change the IDs of all the tasks in a view, display that view; to change the IDs of a selection of tasks, select the tasks in the bar chart.
  2. On the Project tab, in the Properties group, click the Unique Task IDs dropdown and select Unique ID Renumbering. The Renumber Unique Task IDs dialog appears.
  3. Click the Renumber radio button.
  4. In the Prefix field, enter the alphanumeric string of characters with which you want to prefix the unique task IDs that are to be applied to the tasks, for example AA, A2B or IH8T.
  5. In the Numeric suffix field, enter the number that should be added to the prefix and applied to the first of the tasks to create the unique task ID. For example, if you enter 1 and your prefix is AA, the first unique task ID to be created will be AA1.
  6. In the Increment field, enter the number by which each unique task ID should be incremented on from the previous unique task ID. For example, if you want the IDs to be sequential, enter 1; if you want the IDs to increment by 10 each time one is created, enter 10.
  7. Click the appropriate Scope radio button to specify whether you want to change the unique task IDs of the tasks that are currently selected in the bar chart or of all the tasks in the current view.
  8. Click the appropriate When ID conflicts or other problems occur radio button to specify what to do if a problem occurs during the renumbering attempt. Problems may occur if an attempt to change a task's unique task ID would result in duplicate IDs, where duplicates are not allowed.
  9. Click Apply.

To change the unique task IDs of a series of tasks by searching for a string and replacing it with an alternative string:

  1. To change the IDs of all the tasks in a view, display that view; to change the IDs of a selection of tasks, select the tasks in the bar chart.
  2. On the Project tab, in the Properties group, click the Unique Task IDs dropdown and select Unique ID Renumbering. The Renumber Unique Task IDs dialog appears.
  3. Click the Find and Replace radio button.
  4. In the Find field, enter the alphanumeric string that you want to search for within the unique task IDs of the series of tasks, and replace with the string that you enter in the Replace field. For example, if you enter AAA1 in this field and BBB2 in the Replace field, all instances of AAA1 in the unique task IDs of the series of tasks will be replaced with BBB2.
  5. In the Replace field, enter the alphanumeric string with which to replace the string that you enter in the Find field.
  6. Click the appropriate Scope radio button to specify whether you want to change the unique task IDs of the tasks that are currently selected in the bar chart or of all the tasks in the current view.
  7. Click the appropriate When ID conflicts or other problems occur radio button to specify what to do if a problem occurs during the renumbering attempt. Problems may occur if an attempt to change a task's unique task ID would result in duplicate IDs, where duplicates are not allowed.
  8. Click Apply.

Related Topics:

Setting up unique task IDs

Editing unique task IDs

Viewing unique task IDs in the spreadsheet