By clicking Manually Schedule 
on the Gantt Tools tabBy default, MindView tasks are automatically scheduled, which means that any change in the timing of a task affects all the tasks that depend on it. If a task runs ahead of schedule, MindView automatically recalculates the dates of all the tasks that depend on it in order to take advantage of the time gained. Conversely, if a task is delayed, all the tasks that depend on it are automatically rescheduled, which may or may not impact the overall end date of the project.
In some cases, however, you might prefer to insert tasks as "placeholders" without start, end or duration information, or only with incomplete information, and prevent MindView from moving them. This is particularly handy in the early phases of a project when the exact details of many tasks are not yet known. In cases such as this, manual task scheduling provides greater freedom. As it is a far less automatic way of handling tasks, however, it also requires you to manage the start, end and duration information of each manually scheduled task in greater detail than is necessary with automatic scheduling.
You can convert any task selected in the Gantt Outline from being automatically scheduled to being manually scheduled in several ways:
By clicking Manually Schedule on the Gantt Tools tab
By clicking Task Information 
on the Gantt Tools tab and selecting Manually scheduled in the Task Information dialog
By clicking the icon in the Task Mode column in the Gantt Outline and selecting Manually Scheduled on the drop-down
Manually scheduled tasks can be converted back to automatically scheduled tasks at any time by repeating this process but selecting automatic scheduling. See "Converting manually scheduled tasks to automatic scheduling" below for more information on the consequences of this.
You can set all new tasks to be manually scheduled from the MindView Options dialog. You can change this default setting for all projects created in MindView or for the current document only. For more information, see "Setting up your preferences".
Manually scheduled tasks are often used as placeholders in the project plan until reliable information about the tasks becomes available. You therefore do not need to enter start, end or duration information for manually scheduled tasks, and you have the option of entering free text such as "a couple of days" or "after the kick-off meeting" in the Start, End and Duration fields.
You can enter start, end and duration information in the same way as for automatically scheduled tasks, including short date formats such as 1d and 4h. For more information on doing this, see "Entering a task duration" and "Specifying start and end dates" in "Entering and editing tasks".
Start, end and duration information is not used by MindView to schedule the project if the values are not in a recognizable format.
When scheduling information has been entered in a recognizable format, start/end markers are shown in the Gantt chart as shown below. When not, a question mark is shown over the Manually Scheduled icon in the Task Mode column of the Gantt Outline.
Summary tasks can also be manually scheduled. When they are, they have the duration you have entered and do not necessarily summarize the durations of their sub-tasks.
The example below shows a manually scheduled task whose duration is shorter than the manually scheduled summary bar above it.
The main summary bar represents the duration of the summary task you entered manually. The small bar placed underneath the main bar summarizes the sub-tasks in the usual way, to give you some indication of any possible discrepancy between the duration set by you for the summary task and the combined duration of its sub-tasks. When the duration of one or more sub-tasks of a manually scheduled summary task is longer than the duration of the summary task, the small summary bar turns red to alert you, as shown in the example below.
If you change the start or end time or the duration of a manually scheduled task, this change will affect all successor tasks (unless they are manually scheduled too). Changing the start or end time or the duration of a predecessor task of a manually scheduled task, however, has no effect on the manually scheduled task.
Editing the link between a manually scheduled task and its predecessor (for example, changing the link type from Start to Finish (SF) to Finish to Start (FS) in the Task Information dialog) will affect the task if the option Update manually scheduled tasks when editing links has been set to Yes in the MindView Options dialog. For more information, see "Setting up your preferences".
You can assign resources to manually scheduled tasks, but resource calendars have no effect on manually scheduled tasks. Project calendars (in other words, the working and non-working time defined in them) do have an effect on manually scheduled tasks.
Constraints and task types are not relevant when working with manually scheduled tasks.
Once all information about a manually scheduled task is known, you may want to convert it to automatic scheduling for easier project management.
If you have provided sufficient recognizable scheduling information about the manually scheduled task, this information is unchanged when the task is converted.
If you have not provided sufficient recognizable scheduling information, the task is converted to an automatically scheduled task with a duration of one day starting on the project start date.
Always double-check that the scheduling information of all manually scheduled tasks is correct before converting them to automatically scheduled tasks. This is particularly relevant for large projects with many tasks.