Label Parent to Sub Tasks in Reports & Reminders

It would be helpful if Reports, Reminders and the current Outlook Beta displayed parent task descriptions when information is displayed for sub tasks. In our organization, many sub tasks could have similar descriptions in several phases of our projects. It would be beneifical to see the parent or outdented rows description as well.

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Travis

Good suggestion Chris! I’ll pass it along to the Product team! As a workaround, some users will add an additional column to their sheet with text from the parent row, to use as a descriptor for the child rows when viewed in reports, reminders, etc.

JamesR

A workaround I have used in Reports is to:

Colour the Summary Tasks so that they show up in reports as the Hierarchy does not show. Also in an Empty cell in the Summary Task type the word "summary". then include this in the criteria for the report. This will bring in the tasks you want and its summary, however it will also bring in every other summary task as well. So in will workfor some people but not others.

Polly Peterson

JamesR -

Have you found a way to do the coloring of the summary vs. sub tasks using the conditional formatting option? Or are you manually coloring the summary task cells/rows?

Thanks for clarifying!

Polly

JamesR

As long as you have something that is common to all sub rows and is not in the summary row you can set the criteria by that.

Failing that if you add an additional column and call it Level and then stipulate 1,2 or 3 etc then you can use this to conditionally format any rows accordingly.

Travis, this would be a useful System column that automatically generates when using hierarchy.

Travis

To build on what James suggested, this formula can be added to a checkbox column and will check the box if it is located in a parent row (build the formatting rule based on the checkbox column:

=IF(COUNT(CHILDREN([Task Name]2)) > 0, 1)

Task Name is your primary column and should be referenced in this formula.

James - it sounds like a WBS might be what you are suggesting, correct? This is something our product team is looking into but I dont have any additional information about it at this time.

JamesR

Travis - No actually, although WBS is something that is definatly worth persuing. In MS Project you can Show by Level. i.e.

Show all level 1s to show the top hierarchy

Show all level 2s wthich show the level1s and 2s

If one of the level 2s had subordinate tasks then they would be level 3s etc

Many hierarchical structures may well have multi level hierarchys starting with Level 1s, everything that is subordinate to it at one indent is Level 2 and everything that is subordinate to it at two indents is level 3 etc.

Level 1s will always be a Summary bar, level 2s and below can be tasks rows or summary rows when they contain sub tasks (Activities).

cinchbold86771

Further to Chris Easterwood's comment in 2015, It would be helpful if Reports, Reminders and the current Outlook Beta displayed parent task descriptions when information is displayed for sub tasks. In our organization, many sub tasks could have similar descriptions in several phases of our projects. It would be beneficial to see the parent or outdented rows description as well.

I would be interested to know whether any further developments have taken place regarding this concept as our organisation also has sub-tasks with similar descriptions, but the parent tasks are quite different. Seeing the parent task + the sub-task in a reminder would be particularly helpful, especially on the mobile app.