Calendars
By defining the days and hours during which work can be scheduled, calendars allow you to create a realistic project plan.
Typically, calendars are standardized across an entire organization and define a standard working day (for example, 8:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M.), a normal workweek (for example, Monday through Friday), and a set of observed holidays. In some cases, you may want to define more detailed calendars that contain information such as a specific activity work schedule or an employee vacation schedule.
Open Plan has a flexible calendar function that allows you either to define calendar files on a project-by-project basis or to create a single calendar file that can be used with multiple projects. Calendars can also be defined for resource files. Within each calendar file you can define a default calendar, which can then serve as the model for subsequent calendars. You can also define a standard workweek for a calendar and then define any holidays or extra days as exceptions. These features can help you create and maintain project and resource calendars that can be used for planning purposes throughout your organization.
When you first create a calendar file, Open Plan provides a default calendar that assumes Monday through Friday to be working days with an 8-hour work day. You then have the opportunity to modify these defaults and define non-working days as well as holidays and extra work days.
You can create calendars either as a copy or as a child of any calendar. All calendars inherit the defaults of the calendar from which they were copied. New calendars that are not copied from another calendar inherit the settings of the default calendar. For example, assume that you enter all company holidays for 2007 on a company calendar. All calendars created either as a copy or a child of the company calendar will inherit the same set of holidays.
If you modify the default calendar after creating additional calendars, your changes affect only calendars created in the future. Changes to the default calendar have no effect on other calendars already created. In contrast, if you make a change to a parent calendar, the change is reflected in all its child calendars.