I was recently working on a low level plan created in Microsoft Project (.mpp) which was designed for tracking activities, time & resources for a critical project activity. We need input from multiple teams for time & resource estimation and thus multiple people were updating the plan.
Every thing was fine till I open the plan to update in morning which was working till late evening. I was unable to open the document due to circular dependency error. The error says
No Calculations are performed.
There is circular relationship in the task 947 <Task Description> of “LLP”. The successors of this task refer back to this task or its predecessors, causing a circular reference.
To remove the link that is causing the circular reference, select the two tasks that are causing the circular link, and then click Unlink Tasks on the Standard toolbar.
I tried to find the two tasks but plan was having thousands tasks so finding manually was cumbersome & time consuming. Further I start by removing dependency of that task that is causing circular dependency. But this approach was not fruitful as same error was replicating for further task & on some research I found the task provided in error has no circular dependency at all. I was still to find a way that can same my day from manually checking about three thousand task plan manually.
I google it on the internet & with some efforts I was able to resolve the problem. The Solution was:
- Insert a new column in Microsof Project plan.
- Copy all predeccessor column value in the new custom text field(say Text1_Pred)
- now bulk delete all values in predeccessor column
- Now copy back all the value from Text1_Pred into Predeccessor Column again
- it would start giving error with “Task ID No” as pasting error for circular reference. Note TaskId.
- It give you option to ignore problem or continue without problem or cancel Choose NO “continue without problem “) option to remove.
Voila, this took only two minutes and the error was gone. I was again able to open project plan again & this saved my day.
Hope it will someone else with the problem.
Connoisseur 