Project Settings Options Not Providing Every Column as Option for % Complete Column

Jay DeLuca

We have a Project Plan with dependencies anables and parent/child relationships across the plan. I want to show the % complete visually in the Gantt section where the thinner % complete ribbon overlays the task ribbon based on it's percent complete.

However, when I go into Project Settings>Options>% Complete column, it gives me only five options, "None" and four other columns from the Project Plan. The columns it offers are random ones from our plan; some are numbers, some are text, but one of the options isn't our "Status" column which is our % Complete column. The Status column I want to use lists one of four statuses for the children (Unassigned, Assigned, In Progress, and Complete) and uses a formula to calculate the % Complete for each parent wherein any status other than Complete is counted as 0 towards the parent complete %.

Does anyone know why the Status column is not an option under Project Settings>Options>% Complete column and how I can modify another setting to get it to show up as an option there?

BullandKhmer

The way you have described this is never going to work.

To qualify as a % complete column the column must:

• Can only have % complete (i.e. a number not statuses)
• Be manually entered, not a formula.

Also, the % complete column will automatically calculate the % complete of parent tasks based on the duration and % complete of child tasks.

Best practice would be to have a status column AND a % complete column. I think you can build an automation to change the % complete of a row based on the status of that row, i.e. when the status changes to 'complete' the % complete changes to 100%.

But there is NO WAY around the % complete of parent tasks calculating based off the duration and % complete of its children.

Your two options are:

a) Continue the way you are are not have the % complete overlay on the Gannt bars

b) Build sperate status and % complete columns and accept the % complete auto-calculation as is.

Jay DeLuca

Thanks so much for taking the time to reply to my question. I made the changes according to your recommendationa nd we are now all set. I thought that you only could have data in a % complete column but what really had me confused was that 3/4 columns apperaring as dropdown options in the % Complete dropdown had text in them, so that made me think it could be done. Turns out that if you restrict values to dropdown values only, it won't allow that column to even appear as an option for the % Complete column.