Rounded time values and scheduling granularity

Rounded time values

If a value contains a unit of time that is too small to be displayed, you may see a rounded value. For example, if you have turned off the display of minutes in the Formats inspector, and you have a task that starts at 9:00 and ends at 9:55, the value you see is "< 1h". If you want to know the actual value, you can turn on the smaller units in the Project Formatting inspector, or just check the start and end times. If you want to edit the value to conform to your units, you can just delete the greater-than or less-than sign and the value updates.

Scheduling granularity

Taking the duration rounding a step further, you can use the Granularity control on the Project Information inspector to force OmniPlan to round every duration up to the nearest whole hour or day. This setting is not just for display purposes, but actually changes how exact OmniPlan should be about scheduling tasks.

By default, OmniPlan uses Exact Scheduling: if you have a task with an effort of 58 minutes, starting at 8:00, then it is drawn exactly 58 minutes long on the Gantt chart, dependent tasks start at 8:58, leveling makes the resource begin working on the next task at 8:58, and so on. The start and end times of tasks are exact down to the second.

With Hourly Scheduling, start and end times happen at the next whole hour mark. A task starting at 8:00 with an effort of 58 minutes (or even 1 minute), ends at 9:00; successor and resource leveled tasks begin at 9:00, and so on.

With Daily Scheduling, start and end times are always pinned to the beginning or end of work days. The 58-minute task ends at the end of the day, successor and resource leveled tasks begin on the next day, and so on.

Regardless of the granularity setting, OmniPlan doesn't forget any of the values you enter. You can still specify task effort and resource units with any amount of precision, and OmniPlan stores those values in case you switch back to exact scheduling.