Gantt View Earliest Start Date

Question

How do I get a row on a Gantt chart to show the earliest date from amongst a set of predecessors?

I have a gantt chart where I want one row to display a 0-duration task with the earliest start date from amongst five predecessors. I've entered them as start-to-start predecessors, so in theory it should start when the earliest of them starts, but in practice it takes the latest date instead.

Ideally, I'd use a MIN() function to collect the date, but you can't have formulae in start or end date columns anymore. I'd also ideally nest them together under the same parent, but the whole reason I have to do this is because these rows are nested in amongst other rows I don't want to count.

I can get the latest date just fine using finish-to-finish, but the earliest is stumping me. Is there a way to get that value that I'm just missing

Jgorsich · Accepted Answer

Start-to-Start with multiple predecessors does require all of them to start - that is inherent in "predecessor", you are saying that line X is dependent on all these other lines also.  What you really want is what you alluded to - you want all of these to be grouped together and then you want the start and end date for the group (which would be the earliest start date and the last end date), but you can't do that directly without messing up the format of the rest of your schedule.

So - cheat a bit 🙂.  Create a new section in your schedule (Maybe in the middle, maybe way at the end, up to you) called something like "Category Extracts".  In this new area make a line called "Millwork" with subtasks called "kitchen and island", "bath vanity" etc.  Set these as Start to Start with the matching lines in your true schedule with a SINGLE dependency for each (rather than multiple) and set duration equal to the duration in the originating line. Then you can pull a 0 day duration off of the new Millwork entry in your "Extracts" section and be good to go.

It isn't the cleanest way to do it, but it will work.

For a cleaner method, I think you can also tie it to assigned resources and do something there, or add a column with identified flags for millwork and do something with that, but I've not experimented with either of those.