Linking cells to a child cell in another worksheet

Todd Harrison

I have created a Summary Worksheet to capture high-level milestones from a collection of project plans.  The way I set up the summary tracker is to create a parent-child relationship under each project and am trying to link the start and end dates from the original project plan to this summary worksheet.  The challenge I am having is with the Dependencies box checked which allows changes in the child rows to auto-update the parent row the End Date cell will not allow me to link from another sheet.  This requires double-entry for the project managers on both the core project plan and then on the summary worksheet.  

Is there any way to get the cell linking feature to work while dependencies are enabled?

Paul.Koetke

Hi Todd, 

No it is not possible to use cell linking in date columns using dependancies because this would create a conflict of information. Either the dependencies will determine the dates in the column or the cell linking will. If this both gave different dates you would have a problem, so dependancies trump cell linking. 

Sounds like you shouldn't be using dependancies in this summary sheet at all. I would assume you want your project sheets to be telling your summary sheet what all the dates are rather than the summary sheet driving your projects. 

If these projects are all interrelated, perhaps it would make sense to put them all in one big project sheet separated by hierarchies?

Let me know if this helps, otherwise happy to brainstorm different solutions. 

Paul Koetke

Upwork - Smartsheet Consultant