Absolute End Date Not to Change / Critical Paths on Grid View

tagoetz

I am trying to figure out how to sent an absolute end date to my project & then if any predecessors take longer than the original duration, & now the overall project timeline can't meet that date, it doesn't change the absolute end date....if makes you less duration of remaining tasks.

Also, how do I see critical path "tasks" on the grid view? 

J. Craig Williams

Smartsheet does not have constraints like "must finish no later than" or "must start no earlier than".  Sometimes, the schedule will change in undesirable ways because of this limitation when reality deviates from the plan.

I assume you have read this post on reverse scheduling:

https://www.smartsheet.com/blog/support-tip-work-back-schedule

Sometimes that can help.

The closest to "seeing" the critical path on the grid view that I know of is to filter for it using the Row filter option. See the section "Filter on Critical Path, Attachments, Comments, and Locked Rows" about two-thirds of the way down here:

https://help.smartsheet.com/articles/504659-using-filters-to-show-or-hide-sheet-data

I hope that helps.

Craig

tagoetz

Thanks Craig for your quick response.

You answered my first question - that Smartsheets doesn't have those constraints.  Darn!

Thanks for the link on critical paths.  Creating a filter will have to work.  & I figured out that I have to apply "task row #s" as predecessors, not "milestone row #s".

Thanks again,

Theresa

J. Craig Williams

Glad I had time to help and it did.

It would be nice if there was a way to retrieve such things as "this row is on the critical path" in formulas. It would open up a lot of functionality.

Craig

Philip Robbins

Just updating this thread. You can now do this using something like: =IF(ISCRITICAL([Task name]@row), 1, 0). You can then use conditional formatting to highlight cells/rows/text for tasks on the critical path.

Cheers,

Phil