Tying parent tasks to children in reports

Sean Callahan

As far as I can tell this hasn't been brought up recently - hoping there may be new information available.

I'm trying to build a report that pulls in tasks by current user, so that the viewer sees only those tasks that apply to him/her pulled in from multiple sheets. The challenge is that I also want the parent/grandparent tasks to appear in the report - but only for the tasks filtered by current user. I.e., I don't want the report to pull every parent task - only the parent tasks of children that apply to the current user.

For example: I have tasks assigned to me on 5 sheets, and each sheet has 4 sections of tasks divided into categories by parent tasks. But my tasks only appear in one or two sections on each sheet. I don't want to see the parent tasks for the sections where I have no tasks assigned. That's the challenge I'm tasked with solving.

I've figured out a good way to pull in parent tasks when I filter by a specific user, but not a way to do so when the filter criteria changes based on who is viewing the report.

Happy to clarify and give additional context as needed - thank you!

Sean

Genevieve P.

Hi Sean,

With your current set up there wouldn't be a way to automatically do this - the Report will look for criteria in each row individually. Therefore, if the Parent row doesn't have any association with that Current User, it won't know when it should be shown for specific people. Either we could set it up so all parent rows show, or none.

You could use the option to select multiple contacts and make sure that all the contacts in the child tasks are selected in one cell of that parent row, but there's currently no function that could do this for you automatically in a Contact column.

What I would suggest doing is have the task name of the Parent row visible somewhere on the same row as the Child Task... perhaps in a helper column. You could do this with the PARENT function, like so:

Then in your Report, you can make sure this column is present. Keep in mind that you can hide the column in the sheet, but still make it visible in your Report. I've also applied formatting to the column so that it's clear what the Primary task is:

Let me know if this would work for you!

Cheers,

Genevieve

Kathy Jacobs

I have the same need and it seems goofy to have to add this information manually when indenting the child row creates the parent. The application knows the child is related to the parent because it rolls up task durations/starts and finishes, so it seems like the development team could allow the option of showing the parent row related to the tasks that fit the report criteria. Is that on anyone's development roadmap?

Genevieve P.

Hi @Kathy Jacobs

Thanks for your feedback! It's good to know that your use case would also benefit from this type of functionality in Reports. To let our Product Team know about your request so they can consider it for development, please submit an Enhancement Request through this form.