What Is A Milestone In Microsoft Project Professional?

In my previous articles, I explained the basics of Microsoft Project like,

• How to Create Project in Microsoft Project 2013
• How to Baseline a Project in Microsoft Project 2013
  
  
  

Following to these articles, I will explain you what the milestone in Project is, how it occurs, and how it looks in Gantt chart.

Let’s begin our discussion by referring to our previous work program.

This is my work program in Microsoft Project.

In addition to entering tasks to be completed, we want to capture an important event for your project plan, such as the end of a Kick-off meeting (task) of the project.

To do this, we will create a milestone task.

Milestones are significant events that are reached within the plan, such as completion of a phase of work.

Take note

Milestones are represented as tasks with zero duration.

Click the task name "Kick-off Meeting" as shown in the above screenshot.

Then, select "Insert milestone" from task ribbon, as shown below.

As soon as you click on "Insert milestone", a new task is added to your list.

And, you can see that the duration of that particular new task is Zero. We can give a name to this new task. Just click on "New milestone" and type "Sample" (Taskname) and press Enter.

The milestone is added to your plan.

Note

On the GanttChatt, the milestone appears as a diamond shape.

I have explained how to create a new milestone task, but here is one question - Why can’t an existing task be a milestone?

You’re correct. Upon finishing, the task duration automatically becomes zero. So, zero duration is nothing but a milestone.

For your kind information, we can also mark current task as milestone manually.

Steps to do manually

• Just select the task which you want to mark as milestone.
• Then, a pop-up window appears, as shown below.
  
  
  

Select the "Advanced" tab and check the "mark task as milestone" option, as shown below.

That’s it. You can see the output down here.

Thanks for reading.