Task Date Issue

jamiefico

Hello, in a project plan sheet I have tasks in certain rows of sheet that are defaulting with a specific future date for no reason - there are no dependencies, it's not the project start date, so I'd like to ask what are other root causes for this behavior. Duration calculates correctly for the end date, but the start date is overwriting as 10/11/2023 no matter what I try to type in it. Other task rows are not having this problem. When I try to recreate the tasks in rows above in this same general vicinity, it's the same behavior and I cannot figure out why.

Tara Patton

@jamiefico I was able to get help from support on my plan. Somehow a predecessor had been added to one of my grandparent rows (human error on my part) and that was causing all subtasks to update to the date in October. I took a quick look at the screenshot you posted above, and it looks like you have a predecessor for your "Communications" header row (predecessor is row 312). The date for the Comm row is 10/11/23 which is what is impacting all of the subtasks. Try removing that predecessor and see if that fixes it. Fingers crossed!

Andrée Starå

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/109462/task-date-issue

Hi,

I hope you're well and safe!

Can you share some screenshots? (Delete/replace any confidential/sensitive information before sharing) That would make it easier to help.

I hope that helps!

Be safe, and have a fantastic weekend!

Best,

Andrée Starå | Workflow Consultant / CEO @ WORK BOLD

✅Did my post(s) help or answer your question or solve your problem? Please support the Community by marking it Insightful/Vote Up, Awesome, or/and as the accepted answer. It will make it easier for others to find a solution or help to answer!

jamiefico

jamiefico

Sure, see above image I just posted - it's the start dates in the blue rows - don't change from 10/11

Paul Newcome

Have you tried adjusting the duration?

jamiefico

Yes, same behavior in terms of automatically reverting to October 11th for start date.

Tara Patton

@jamiefico I am having the exact same issue in one of my plans. It started last week, and the dates are pushing out to October 2023. I'm going to submit a support ticket. This is bizarre.

jamiefico

Thanks Tara for letting me know, it certainly is bizarre - just curious is your start date defaulting to October 11th?

Tara Patton

No, my start date is staying at 3/3/23, which is correct. I did discover that if a parent row wasn't marked as complete, ALL tasks under it were being shifted to dates in October, even ones that were marked as complete and occurred in the past. For any parent rows that were marked as complete, all sub tasks remained unchanged. For any parent row and associated subtasks that NO tasks were marked as complete, those also remained unchanged. It seems to be only impacting milestones that have a mix of complete and not complete. So for my project, my onboarding and kickoff milestones are fine because everything was marked off as complete. My project finalization milestone is also ok as nothing has been completed yet. But everything in between is a mess. The only workaround we've found is to disable dependencies in project settings and manually update the tasks in the impacted milestones. Definitely not a sustainable solution. I'm afraid to update any of my other existing plans for fear that the same thing will happen.

Tara Patton

@jamiefico I was able to get help from support on my plan. Somehow a predecessor had been added to one of my grandparent rows (human error on my part) and that was causing all subtasks to update to the date in October. I took a quick look at the screenshot you posted above, and it looks like you have a predecessor for your "Communications" header row (predecessor is row 312). The date for the Comm row is 10/11/23 which is what is impacting all of the subtasks. Try removing that predecessor and see if that fixes it. Fingers crossed!

jamiefico

Bless you Tara, that is it! I totally didn't see that thank you for taking the time to let me know the solution!!

Tara Patton

You're so welcome! I'm glad we were both able to get our projects squared away!