I haven’t tried to play with dependencies since they were formally programmed into the timeline view, and I’m now looking at it again.
I’d like the start date of a task to be determined by the end date of the task it is dependent upon. This is doable with formulas, but I run into an issue when the initial task in a chain cannot not have a start date. Is there a workaround for this? Or is this now how dependencies are supposed to function?
Thanks!
Here is a doc where I gave dependencies a try. Might not be exactly what you’re looking for, but might be something you can tweak for your needs.
This works backwards based on a due date, how many days each task takes, and which tasks have dependencies.
Wow Ben, this is actually exactly what I was trying to make; a work back plan that works from a desired end date backwards automatically based on days to complete, with start and end dates entirely generated via formulas. Genius stuff!
This is perfect for planning, but I’m curious if you’d keep using it during the project process, and if so how. Like, if a task was done sooner than expected, how would you reflect that in the plan? You could update the “days to complete” of that task, but that would just change the past start/end dates. Would love any thoughts on this!
I’m glad it helped!
For a task getting done early, there are several ways you could go about it. You could just leave it and know that you’re ahead of schedule, you could set days to complete to “0” to essentially remove it’s time dependency, or you could reset the days to complete counting from the start date for the task to Today(). I haven’t tried putting any of those solutions in, but I would think they are all doable and maybe only need an extra column or two to make them happen, if those are needed at all. A lot can be done with a button as well.
I’d mess around with it and figure out what workflow works best for you.
