No Predecessor but Date Cell won't change

Jill Youngberg

I am working on a schedule and have a row with no predecessor, however the "start date" won't let me manually change it. It keeps auto-correcting back to the same date that has been in it from the beginning.

 

Any thoughts?

Paul Newcome

When dependencies are enabled you cannot change the start and finish dates. You have to create another column for them and then change those, but they will not be reflected in your Gantt View.

 

If you enable your dependencies in Gantt view to auto-populate the predecessors, etc... then disable the dependencies, you can tweak them from there, but once you re-enable them it will change back. It is an issue I have been trying to find a work around to for quite some time now.

Jill Youngberg

That is odd. I don't think I have ever had that problem before. I just tested the same scenario on a different schedule and didn't have that problem. I checked the settings and they are the same on both projects.

Paul Newcome

Hmm... The only way I have ever been able to edit start and finish dates without having to edit the predecessor and/or the duration is to have dependencies off. With them on I have never been able to adjust the dates that are being used for that.

J. Bulcao

I'm having the exact same problem with one of my project sheets. Curious to understand what's going on and what's the solution for that. This seems to be a bug. Had never happened to me before, even with Dependencies enabled.

dAVE Inden

I was able to reproduce this behavior using similar Project settings like what Paul Newcome posted above, but with leaving Dependencies enabled. Note, that the Start Date column is set to a column titled Finish and the Finish Date column is set to a column titled Start.

In my sheet the columns are in the order of Start on the left and Finish to the right. The task is set to a 1 day Duration and attempting to change the date to one in the past in the Start column it reverts back to the previous date. This is because that column is being treated as the Finish Date for the task and it cannot be set back behind the Start Date column, which is in a column titled Finish.

I am attaching screenshots of what I am seeing. I suggest double checking in the Project Settings of the sheet that the Start Date and Finish Date columns are set as needed to have the dates behave as expected. If someone is still having issues I would suggest reaching out to Support here.

 

César

Happens to me the same thing, but I realised it was due to the parent task dependencies. Then, I deleted that, and worked out.

Shane Klos

Thank you cesbue! I was going crazy and about to report a bug :)

It was working nearly everywhere else but not on this one task that was being used as a leverage point all over the place.

I will go home now and pretend I am not blind and stupid :)

S. Winkler

I just experienced the same issue, but then saw that my parent row had a Predecessor, which I think is what cesbue is also saying.

Alex Tumlinson

I cant tell from the comments here whether people can find this behavior useful. I want to create a project where there are dependencies, but also periodically reconcile with real life:

Task 2 cannot start before the finish of Task 1, but in reality Task 2 started a week late because of a dependency that isn't documented in the schedule (lets say its a true externality that should not be in the schedule); do I have to artificially create that in the dependency like Task 1 + 7d? That makes it seem like there was a logical reason why we had to delay, when the real reason for the delay was unrelated to the predecessor.

alan fisher

I can't understand why SmartSheet is so complicated and does not put the user in control.

If I want to edit a start date because that is the reality then let me edit the start date. I don't care about any dependency logic

Sheila Gibbs

Hi,

I experienced the same issue. I realized that I had a predecessor on the Summary level, which for my situation, was in appropriate. Once I removed the predecessor, everything worked as expected.

Hope this helps!

avocadoshots

The reason this is happening for me is because I am copying and pasting something that is a subtask to a higher level task. Sometimes when copying and pasting, changing dates on things, we can forget the inherited properties because even if there is no predecessor on the task there may be a + sign above it.

Anyone who experiences this issue should try moving the task name all the way to the left. On Mac this is with cmd+[ and cmd+] to move it to the right. This hotkey will either make it a subtask of whatever the above task is. I made an account just to post this. Good luck y'all.

RJosephWilson

I tried using 0 as the predecessor and it allowed me to override with no impact on the schedule.

ktlafleche

RJosephWilson's fix worked for me. Thanks!

Alberto Caeiro

RJosephWilson This fix also worked for me.
It's a shame that we are not able to see these "invisible" dependencies. THANKS!