Hello,
Our engineering manager uses Microsoft Project to manage the availability of the engineering team. We license Project through Office 365.
He has two custom reports in Project which are for the purpose of identifying the engineering work load.
For whatever reason, the content of these reports is periodically lost. The reports are simply blank instead of containing the graphs, etc. that were previously there.
I resolve this for him by opening a restored copy of the file and then just copy/pasting the report content from the restored file into the original file. I don’t remember for sure, but I believe he also at one point did migrate the data itself into a new Project file.
He believes that it has something to do with disconnecting from his docking station while the Project file is open. I am doubtful that this would fully explain the cause, but I’m not ruling it out.
Has anyone seen anything like this before? Any ideas on what would cause this?
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I’ve seen this with other apps, but not Project. It actually was related to disconnecting the docking station. The connection to the network was hard wired ethernet when attached to the docking station and Wi-Fi when not, and switching the network connection on the fly like that was mucking things up.
I figure that the system would get confused by the network interface change. The MAC address and the IP address of the machine both change when changing from ethernet to Wi-Fi. Because both these addresses are involved with file locks on the server, the system doesn’t like the interface changing on the fly if a network file is currently in use.
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If you think it’s the docking station, have you tried to unplug the ethernet cable and just run the computer on Wi-Fi and see if they have the same issue if the dock gets unplugged from the computer?
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Is this something where he’s working on Project Server? You might want to looking at the steps for working offline, even for a short time. Also, if the project files are stored on a network share, you would likely follow similar steps. Try running some tests, with everything saved first, of course. Look at the File/Info to verify connection. You could test by activating Offline mode, then deactivating it to see if it refreshes.
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Thanks! Your explanation about file locks helps this make more sense as far as why this would make a difference.
We are currently trying the suggestion from @geraldkuiper to see if this acts as a remedy to the issue as well.
No, we’re not using Project server. Just regular standalone Project .mpp files. The file is stored on a network share.
