From managing a single project to planning hundreds of OKRs in Coda, your tasks and timelines can have complex dependencies. For those moments, we’re excited to introduce a new timeline feature that will help you update large and complex projects: enforced dependencies.
Dependencies add a layer of automation and smart logic to project timelines—a way to automatically adjust interconnected tasks so you can focus on the big picture instead of updating every line. Quick note: this feature is available to workspaces on our Team and Enterprise tiers so teams can ensure that their interconnected tasks adjust automatically when schedules change, making it easier to manage large and complex projects.
You can easily set up dependencies through the options menu for any timeline. You can customize how they work for you by defining specific task attributes. Namely, Start date, End date / Duration, Depends on, and Enforcement type. The enforcement types dictate how dependent tasks react when a primary task is moved and can be Flexible, Strict, or Visual.
Once configured, dependencies apply to the base table and all associated views. Any updates to values in the tracked Start date, End date / Duration and Depends on columns will trigger enforcement Flexible or Strict rules. This means your entire project stays in sync and your team stays on the same page.
Dependencies ensure that your team’s workflow remains as dynamic and interconnected as your projects. In this busy end-of-year planning season, we hope this makes managing tasks, timelines, and initiatives seamless and delightful.
If I undo it, it sends me to the source table page instead of staying where the timeline is;
Working days-based schedules don’t work, i.e., if I shift End from Thursday to Friday, the dependent task (next) should change from Friday to Monday, not Saturday. All my schedules are real work projects, so we calculate durations in working days. No weekends;
I would like to move a task into strict enforcement mode and affect only dependent tasks (the next ones), not previous ones.
Overall, it’s a fantastic update! But I cannot use it now because of the Working Days limitation.
A side note: My timeline shows the End (Due) date as a full day! This is the fix for an issue previously reported below. But I do not see this working in all documents. I tested in two; one is now updated, and the other has the old issue. Not sure why.
@Christiaan_Huizer The critical path is, in a gantt/dependency chart’, the path of tasks that have to happen, to complete the project in the shortest time. For example if you are building a house, and you have 100 tasks to do, there may only be 1 or 5 that, if delayed, will actually delay the building of the house. Many of the other ones may have ‘float’ … like when you are starting, laying the foundation is ‘critical’ whereas putting in the landscaping is not (yet). So people who are optimizing want to use maths to find the ‘critical path’ through all the tasks, so they can complete as quickly and efficiently as possible.
hi @Ramesh_Nagarajan , I am not sure how you interpret non working day, but the current set up of working days and non working days is typical USA and does not take into account other variations. Is this something you will look into?
The alternative is that users create their own working schema per employee, that is at least what I do.
hi @Johg_Ananda , thanks for the clarification, I did not know this concept (the word group) , but of course I do see the logic of the principle applied. This would indeed be a valuable addition.
I’m happy to see all kinds of new timeline features, but for me I’m a bit confused about how you can work effective in the timeline without the possibility to select and move multiple lines. In other software this is done by dragg-click a square with the mouse and/or select multiple times by using the shift key. I haven’t found a way here.
Is there a way, or could you please implement this?
Launched: Quick add dependencies directly from the timeline
Excited to share a small update that’ll make adding dependencies less cumbersome — you can now set them up by dragging and dropping, right from the timeline view!
To do this, first enable dependencies from the timeline display panel and hover over an event. You can click or drag the dependency handle from an event to another event you’d like to create a dependency between. To remove a dependency, right-click on the dependency line in the timeline and select “Remove dependency” from the menu.
