The Microsoft Project Organizer is a cool capability that allows you to transfer views and other defined objects between opened project files. The Organizer is one of the lesser-known features in Microsoft Project and is often overlooked. And yet, it can help build templates and make already built-in elements available across different projects. For example, if you build a company calendar and require it in other projects that you are working on, or you want to transfer it to another scheduler, you can. By using the Organizer in Microsoft Project, you can copy it anywhere.
Here, we’re going to use the Microsoft Project Organizer to transfer a calendar.
Figure 1
In Figure 1, is our ‘PIPE REPAIR -18mpp’ project which has a ‘4×10 Work Week calendar’. We want to share it with our new project ‘MOTER REPAIR-10mpp’ because it is not currently available to that project. See Figure 2.
Figure 2
To copy the ‘4×10 Work Week’ calendar from the ‘PIPE REPAIR-18.mpp’ to the ‘MOTOR MODEL-10.mpp’ we must use the Organizer; by selecting File, Info and Organize.
We select the calendars tab in Organizer where we can set the source project to ‘PIPE REPAIR-18.mmp’ and also select the ‘4×10 Work Week’ calendar (Figure 3). We can then copy it to the ‘MOTOR MODEL-10.mmp’ project.
Figure 3
When we open the dialog box for ‘MOTOR MODEL-10.mmp’ project, the ‘4×10 Work Week’ calendar is available to use (Figure 4). It is also still available in the original ‘PIPE REPAIR-18.mmp’ project.
Figure 4
However, to use the calendar we must make one further. We need to change the calendar from an 8 hour a day 5-day working week calendar to a 10 hour a day 4-day working week.
By right-clicking on the Gantt chart we select Nonworking Time and in the Timescale dialog shown in Figure 5. We can see that ‘Corporate- Standard Full Time (Project Calendar)’ is in use which is an 8×5 calendar. So, we select the ‘4×10 Work Week calendar’ and OK it.
Figure 5
By going back to the Organizer we select Project Options and Schedule (Figure 6) and change the hours from 8 to 10.
Figure 6
And Voilà, our completed ‘MOTOR MODEL-10.mmp’ schedule shown below in Figure 7.
Figure 7
Summary
Calendars can take some time to create, but with the rather cool Microsoft Project Organizer tool, it’s easy to copy from one opened project to another. After copying a calendar to a new project, you should check that the time calendar is correct by updating the nonworking time calendar, hours a day.