Dependencies, critical path and changing dates

Hi everyone,

I have some issues with the dependencies function in Smartsheet and was wondering whether someone could help out.

I am really keen to see the dependencies and the critical path, which are possible in SmartSheets. However, I found two issues...

1. I would like to be able to see, that if I want to change a start date or end date, whether that has consequences for my critical path, without having to scroll through my 300+ rows. Is there a function that kind of alerts me that if I am changing this date, it will affect other rows? Both critical path and non-critical path dependencies? Preferably, before it changes the actual dates of others?
2. Secondly, I would like to filter my rows to see my critical path. Or at least have a colour coding in the table to see my critical tasks. Does something like that exist?

Thanks!

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Comments

J. Craig Williams

Anne,

Sadly, the answer to both your questions I believe is "no"

Or all four questions depending on how you count.

I've considered (and made some progress on) determining the ES, EF, LS, LF myself

(early start, early finish, late start, late finish for non-PM's) but after implementing a solution for EV and SV (earned value and schedule variance), the sheet was horribly slow. (The rest of the sheet was complicated too).

Sorry to be the news bearer.

Craig

Anne Reijns

Hmm ok, Thanks for the quick answer though. Any way then to highlight which rows would be effected by a date change?

J. Craig Williams

Here's what I do:

Create Planned Start and Planned End columns.

Copy the whole Start column data to Planned Start.

Create a Start Variance with a formula

=DATEONLY(Start23) - [Planned Start]23

Non-0's mean a shift.

Report for End

Either a Report (if a large project) or conditional formatting (if small) to highlight non-0's.

Not ideal but better than being surprised when the project is late.

Craig

Kennedy Stomps

Those are good solutions, Craig. Anne, though neither of the features you described are currently available in Smartsheet, I've added your votes for this to our enhancement request list.

Anne Reijns

Thanks again,

I am trying the formula, but it gives me a #Missing or Invalid parameters notification. Both columsn are date columns and the variance column is a number/text column, but it still does not seem to work...

The formulas I tried were:

=DATEONLY([Actual Start Date]1 - [Planned Start Datum]1)

=DATEONLY(Actual Start Date1) - [Planned Start Datum]1

Anyone an idea what I did wrong here?

Thanks!

J. Craig Williams

Anne,

The DATEONLY() goes around the Actual Dates, not both.

The date columns that Smartsheet uses for dates are DATE/TIME columns.

The ones not in the Project Settings are just dates (DATE type columns)

So DATEONLY gets rid of the time info and allows apples-to-apples comparison.

Craig

ps unless you like oranges.