Dates and durations

Click the Start cell and type a date, then press Enter.

Or double-click the cell, or press Alt+Down in it, to pick from a small calendar. While you are typing in the cell, a small calendar icon also appears beside it: click it to open the same calendar.

Things to know:

• A start on a day off moves to the next working day. If you type a Sunday and your team doesn’t work Sundays, the task starts on Monday. The status bar tells you when this happens.
• If a task waits for another task, you can’t type its start. Its start comes from the task it depends on, and the Start cell is greyed. To make it start later, add a delay to the link. See Linking tasks.
• Clearing the Start cell puts the task on today’s date.

Click the Duration cell, type a length and press Enter. The end date moves to match.

You can also write the words out: 3 days, 4 hours, 2 weeks. (In a plan in another language, see Typing in another language.) The duration cell shows the unit you typed, so 12h stays as 12h rather than becoming 1.5d.

If you estimate in hours of work rather than in days, a plan can work out each task’s length from its work instead. See When the work sets the length.

Type a date in the End cell. The start stays where it is and the duration changes to fit. An end date before the start is refused.

You can’t type an end date for a milestone, for a phase (summary task), or for a task whose finish is held by a finish-to-finish or start-to-finish link (see Linking tasks).

You can type a date in any of these forms:

• 07-Oct-26, 7 Oct 2026 or Oct 7
• 2026-10-07
• 7/10/26, read in the order of the plan’s date format when that format is all numbers (such as 10/07/2026), and otherwise in the day-and-month order your Windows uses
• 7 on its own, meaning the 7th of this month

If you leave out the year, this year is used.

To change how dates are shown in the grid (for example 10/07/2026 instead of 07-Oct-26), go to Settings › General › Date format in the grid. There are twelve formats to choose from.

The format is saved with the plan, so a plan for a client in Germany can show 07.10.2026 while another shows 10/07/2026. A new plan starts with the format you chose last.

A day is one working day of the plan: 8 hours unless you change it. A week is 40 hours. You can change both in Project › Edit project…, under Hours in a working day and Hours in a working week.

The Oakfield crews work six days a week, so that plan uses 48 hours for a week.

Desktop Plan schedules to the minute, so a plan can mix hours and days. The Kitchen Refit plan below has tasks of 1, 2 and 4 hours. When one ends at noon, the next starts at 1 pm, after lunch.

To see times as well as dates in the grid, tick Show times with dates in Settings › General. Then you can type a time too, such as 07-Oct-26 13:00 or 1pm. To see the hours on the chart, choose the Hour zoom. Like the date format, this is saved with the plan.

Some dates are worked out for you, and their cells are greyed:

Rest the pointer on a greyed cell to see why.