PRJ98: How to Change Unit of Time in the Duration Field

MORE INFORMATION

To change the unit of time displayed in the Duration field, follow these steps.

Use the Format Duration Macro

The Format Duration macro changes all durations for your project to the same unit. The Format Duration macro is useful when you want to change all unit values to the same type. For example, if you have estimated durations in hours and days, but want to display all of your durations in weeks, you can run the Format Duration macro and change all of the durations displayed in hours and days to weeks.

If you are converting a smaller unit to a larger unit, it is possible that rounding errors may occur. For example, if you are converting 15 minutes to days, the result is 0.03125 days. Because Microsoft Project only displays durations to two decimal places, it would round this result to 0.03 days. If you then converted 0.03 days back to minutes, the result would be 14.4 minutes. But because Microsoft Project does not display partial minutes, it would round the duration down to 14 minutes, instead of the original 15 minutes.

To use the Format Duration macro, follow these steps:

1. On the Tools menu, point to Macro and click Macros.
2. In the Macro Name list, click FormatDuration.
3. Click Run.
4. In the Microsoft Project dialog box, type the duration unit in which you want all of the durations to be displayed: m for minutes, h for hours, d for days, or w for weeks.

Change the Units for the Project Summary Task

If the Project Summary task is displayed, the FormatDuration macro will not change the units for it. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Click to select the duration of the Project Summary task.
2. On the Edit menu, point to Clear, and click All.