How to show if a task is ovedue?

Question

I manage a list of tasks for a team. It is not exactly a project yet with critical path etc. But we do have a lot of tasks grouped into categories with a responsible person and a due date.I don't track progress with %, only track if it's done on the due
date or not.
We have a weekly meeting at which we review all overdue tasks. So my question is: How do I show in task list which tasks are overdue and how many days overdue?
For now the only thing I was able to do is to display a warning for delayed tasks. The problem is, Project considers a task delayed even if the due date is not past yet but the progress is not what it should be.
I thought about using baseline, but it doesn't work for me. I want something much simpler than that, something I did in Excel with a simple formula. Can I do it simple in project?

Answer 1

Hi Anastasia,
You could create a flag custom field "overdue" with a formula like this: IIf([Finish Date]<[Current Date];1;0)
The flag would be set to 1 if the task has a finish date in the past. You could eventually improve the model by using the status date instead of the current date, or using another date custom field "due date", manually entered for each task and
used instead of the finish date. Better than that you could use the native "deadline" column to enter a deadline for each task and use it instead of the finish date.
As you can see, many ways to do what you want.
Then you could have a view with tasks grouped along the flag "overdue" yes or no. You could even colour the overdue tasks bars in the Gantt chart with a different colour when the flag is YES.
Tell us if one of those proposals suits to your need and if you need more détails.
Hope this helps,
Guillaume Rouyre, MBA, MVP, P-Seller |