Jim– Larry helped me out Friday, and I didn’t have time to post the solution. I just want to THANK YOU ALL for taking your time to provide assistance and the benefit of your experience. This has been extremely helpful. As promised, here is the "solution" that has worked for me, and if someone has better solutions, please let me know.
Here’s the rest of the post.
Problem: I didn’t know that MS project, in essence, “hard codes” the path linkage among the resource pool and mpps. Here are the rules as I understand them: Once you create a resource pool and subproject links:
Leave them all in the same folder.
Do NOT copy or move
Do NOT rename any of the mpps.
Solution: But what if you “have” done one (or more) of these things? (such as copy a folder from another location). This is what I found to help in troubleshooting and fixing these mistakes..
Troubleshooting. When you open a subproject, (eg: located in “5. Link Folder”)and you get an error indicating your subproject can’t find the pool. Confirm by doing the following:
Go into the resource pool and open it read only.
Click Tools/resource sharing/share resources— and you will very likely see a number of mpps attached that are NOT in the “5. Link Folder.” DON’T DO ANYTHING. Leave the resource pool open “read only.”
FIXING: Now open each of your subprojects, starting with the subproject that didn’t work. Go to Tools/resources/sharing/share resources—and click on the scroll down arrow. You will “likely” see “two versions” of the resource pool.(because of the multiple paths). Click the BOTTOM one, and click Save.
Do this for each of the subprojects that are linked to the resource pool.
Click save for each and then close.
Close Resource Pool (read only) and reopen (in change mode).
Go to Tools/resources/sharing/share resources- and you will see a number of duplicate files in different folder. You only want to keep those projects who are in “5.Link Folder” and delete the rest.
To delete a bad link, Click the bad link, the select “break link.” Repeat until all but the “good links” are there.
Check the list to see that all of the “good subprojects” are linked as well. If not, go into the ones that aren’t and add them.
Of course, reopen EACH subproject to see—that it is linked to the pool, and that you can save and update
Once I fixed everything, the anomalies disappeared, and the "math worked" just fine….
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THANKS again for assisting (and volunteering to assist)–
