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Add a Milestone to Microsoft Project

How to add a milestone to your MS Project plan

This article will show you how to add a milestone to your Microsoft Project plan and to distinguish it from other tasks.

Adding New Milestones

  1. Start with a Microsoft Project plan that contains a few tasks. In this example, our simple project plan contains four tasks, but no milestones yet:
    Microsoft Project plan with tasks.

    If you need help building a new project plan, read this article on how to add tasks to Microsoft Project first.

  2. To insert a milestone in the middle of existing Microsoft Project tasks, select the task below where you want to insert the new milestone. In this example, we want to insert a new milestone between "Task B" and "Task C", so we'll make sure that "Task C" is selected:
    Select a task in Microsoft Project.
  3. Press the INSERT key on your keyboard:
    Insert key.
  4. You should now have a blank row in Microsoft Project, which will give you space to enter the new milestone:
    Blank row in Microsoft Project.
  5. Type in the name of the milestone, set the duration to "0 days", and then set the start date of the milestone:
    Add a new milestone to Microsoft Project

    Notice that Microsoft Project automatically sets the finish date and the start date equal to each other. This is because the milestone is zero days in duration.

  6. Because "Milestone 1" is zero days in duration, it should automatically be marked as milestone in Microsoft Project, but it's always good to double-check. To do this, click on Add New Column and then choose "Milestone" from the dropdown:
    Insert a new field into Microsoft Project
  7. With the "Milestone" field showing, we can now clearly see which lines are marked as milestones in Microsoft Project and which aren't:
    See which lines in Microsoft Project are milestones and which are tasks.

    In most cases, if you insert a task so that it zero days in duration, Microsoft Project will be smart enough to assume it's a milestone. On the other hand, if you create a one-day task and want it to be considered a milestone, you may need to manually change the "Milestone" flag from "No" to "Yes" to force Microsoft Project to treat it as a milestone, instead of treating it as a task with a very short duration.