External Late Finish as a Constraint

The external start or finish dates are the dates the external relationship was scheduled to start or finish. This may be used to calculate the start date or finish date of the current activity during scheduling. 

This field is populated when the project is imported and when an external relationship is lost.An external relationship may be a relationship with an activity that does not exist in the present database. So if you received this schedule from someone else and they had a link to activities in other projects on their computer but they did not give these projects as an xer file then the external start or external finish box would be populated during importing.

Also if you press F9 and then select the options button and look under the General tab and look at the top box to see if ignore relationships from other projects is checked or unchecked that would be the difference you mentioned

Answer by: Zoltan Palffy, www.pmsite.com

Hello DATTATREYA

Basically the previous answer relates exactly what happened. Now one quick way to clean all those external constraints.

Make a filter or a sort on that field and isolate all the activities concerned. then clean the first constraint and selecting also all the others make a "fill down" - this clears all the data in that particular field and activities as you know. Note that you should only clean the information after ensuring all your activities have included in the project file you pocess all the necessary predecessors and successors, otherwise you will have your activities moved to the earliest possible date (and that can be the data date).

Hope it helps.

Have a nice 2012

JMFrade