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Filter using today() in MS Project

In Excel, you can use Today() to call today’s date into a calculation.  For whatever reason, Microsoft hasn’t implemented this in MS Project.

If you want to set up a filter that checks to see if a milestone is due in the next two weeks, you would typically have to use the Status Date of the project.  Using the status date is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. However, there are times when you want to use today’s date.  One example of this is when using Master and Sub project plans, it can be a pain to go into each sub-plan to set the status date.

To use today’s date in a filter, you will have to set up a Custom Field (for instance, Date1) with the calculation set to either:

  • [Current date]
  • Now()

 

custom field with today()

Now that you have this custom field, you can call it into filters such as this one which is used to filter to show critical milestones which are planned for the next two weeks.  This uses an additional text field based on the Today function to show how many weeks until a milestone is due.

filter for milestones in the next 2 weeks.

The full sequence to generate this filter isfull chain of fields and filters to produce the filter

Miles Goodchild

Miles Goodchild has been a Program and Programme Planner, PMO lead and Project Manger since 1998.  He enjoys using MS Office, especially Project, Excel and Visio to make life easier and simpler.  In the course of this he created SummaryPro.  In this blog he shares some of the tips and techniques he has learnt over the years in the hope that they will be useful to you.