With a Dependency enabled, how to create Start dates for specific days of the week

timr54021

I have a building project where tasks cannot begin until an item has arrived from a supplier, then the dependent task can only be carried out on specific days of the week, e.g. a wall cannot be painted until the paint arrives, and the task of painting can only be conducted on, say, Saturday and Sunday.

So (in the example above), while the task of painting cannot commence until the predecessor task of paint being delivered is complete, the person carrying out the actual painting task is only able to work on Saturday and Sunday.

What I need, therefore, is a method of pushing a dependent task forward to the following Saturday.

Is this possible?

Shaine Greenwood

Hello,

You can accomplish this by unchecking Saturday and Sunday in your Project settings to make them working days in your sheet. More information on this is available in the help center: https://help.smartsheet.com/articles/765755-modifying-project-settings#dependencysettings

You can then define dependencies between your "paint delivered" task and your "painting" task.

timr54021

Hi, Shaine.

Appreciate the response. What I failed to ask was, is there a method of pushing a dependent task forward to the Saturday following - automatically so that regardless of the day of the week a predecessor finishes, the dependent task will always start on the following Saturday - without me manually changing start dates to Saturdays? I've read through relevant articles and don't see references suggesting this is possible.

Cheers,

Tim

Shaine Greenwood

Hi Tim—

There currently isn't a way to have tasks automatically push out to a specific day of the week regardless of when their predecessor is finished. (I think you're looking for functionality similar to constraints in MS Project, which we currently don't have in Smartsheet.)

When you have a moment, please submit a product enhancement request using the form under Quick links on the right of the community site to let our Product team know that you'd like to have this functionality added to a future version of Smartsheet.

With that being said, you might consider mimicking baseline functionality in a sheet. This would allow you to manually set up your expected schedule, then track the "actual" start and finish without your expected project plan getting unexpectedly pushed around. More information on mimicking baseline can be found here: https://www.smartsheet.com/blog/quick-guide-mimicking-baseline-functionality-smartsheet

timr54021

Fantastic. Thanks, Shaine. Will submit a feature request and dig into the article.

Thanks for taking time to respond.

Tim (Australia)

Tran Vo

Hi,

Revisiting this question in 2021. Has anything changed in terms of the status of this functionality? I will, in the meantime, look into the baseline functionality in the link shared. Thank you.

Tran

kwelch

I am also following up to see if this functionality has been added. I am looking to do essentially the same thing as described here.

Amy Scherer

Following up in 2022 to see if we have this added yet. Looking to make an end date fall on a specific day of the week.