Showing today's date in gantt view

1845sarah

Is there a way to show a line on the Gantt chart to show today's date? I gather this function is available on MS Project.

In 'Project Settings' you can check the 'open to todays' date option: if you zoom in there is a very faint dotted line to the left (discussion thread here https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/23601/open-to-todays-date-shift-a-little-to-the-right) but is there a way to make this more prominent? Format along the lines of a non-working day perhaps where the 'column' is grey?

I have applied some conditional format in the start and finish columns within the sheet where date = today, but this doesn't transfer to the gantt view

Thanks in advance!

SoS | Dan Palenchar

Hello again @1845sarah

As far as modifying the visual of the actual dotted line I don't believe that's possible.

If you want to make the current day more visually striking you could use the top row (or any row) to help by adding TODAY() formulas in your "Start Date" and "End Date" column, and you could conditionally format the *task bar* to a color you like. If you conditionally format the entire row it won't apply to the task bar so make sure you click on "Task Bar' at the bottom and then select a color. Notice how in the below there is a gold bar next to the "abcde" text.

I actually think it looks better with "Start "Date" being yesterday and "End Date" being the current day since this puts the dotted line in the middle of the task bar, it looks like this:

If you have dependencies enabled then you can't put formulas in the Date columns and this will not work, unfortunately unless you manually update the TODAY row daily. However, you could use a report to combine the data from two Sheets, one that exists just for the TODAY() piece and the other a standard Sheet with dependencies. You can group it or not to look like these options:

So there are some limitations here (as is generally the case with Project Setting stuff) but there are some possible solutions, hopefully one will help.

Dan Palenchar | School of Sheets Solutions Consulting (Smartsheet Aligned Gold Partner)

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