Predecessor Content Change in Report?

Stacey Grey-Gardner

Recently I have noticed that what is displayed in the predecessor column when running a report has changed from showing the specific line dependencies to now just showing the number of predecessors ( i.e., 1 Predecessor, or 2 Predecessors). This isn't really of value when looking at a report. Is there a way to show the precise line items again that are predecessors of each activity in a report?

Thanks!

v/r

Robin Sherwood

Yes, this was changed. There are a couple of reasons for the change.

1. It was confusing. There are two ways to handle predecessors. Show the line number of the report, or show the line number of the underlying sheet. Showing the line in the report is a problem because the task can often have predecessors that are not in the report. Showing the line number of the underlying sheet is also confusing because it isn't apparent that was what was show. Reports don't support dependency lines you could easily assume it meant the report row, which is not correct. 

2. In certain cases, it was impacting report performance. For reports with a large number of sheets with lots of dependencies it was slowing down report load quite a bit. The actual row numbers are not really stored on a sheet, they are calculated every time you load a sheet. Meaning every sheet in the report had to be completely opened and all row numbers calculated even if your report only had 1 row from each sheet. 

Given these two points it was decided to change to a more generic count of dependencies, which still communicates a predecessor, but requires opening the sheet to see the details.