Include predecessor references with copy to another sheet

Tim Starkey

Sorry if this is already in the forum. I searched and did not see it submitted as an idea. It only comes up in other discussions.

Issue: When using copy to another sheet, the rows do not maintain their predecessor references.

Use Case: We utilize Control Center to provision our projects from a standard "PROJECT TEMPLATE". Each project has about 10 sheets and 10 reports. One of the sheets is a "WORK PLAN", which is a standard project schedule sheet (gantt chart). The "WORK PLAN" template in our "PROJECT TEMPLATE" has a very simple gantt schedule to seed the project. It does not work for most project. It would be too cumbersome to have a schedule in the template that covers every use case. Instead, we have a "SCHEDULE TEMPLATE SHEET" that has about 40 different project schedules (small project, multi phase, multi parcels, SD/DD/CD public work, hydrology projects, landscape projects, civil projects, etc) We would like to be able to highlight the rows we want in the "SCHEDULE TEMPLATE SHEET", and copy to the newly provisioned project "WORK PLAN". Unfortunately, when we do this, the predecessors are left blank in the "WORK PLAN". Some of our schedules have 100's of lines. We cannot simply do a save as from the "SCHEDULE TEMPLATE SHEET" and overwrite the new "WORK PLAN" because Control Center keeps track of each sheets unique identifier. This is necessary should we make system wide changes to our projects. I have also seen the work arounds others have posted (using excel, inserting rows to get then aligned between source and destination sheet, then copy paste just the predecessor info) Frankly, they are cludgy and prone to user error when deployed across multiple managers/teams.

Request: Include the predecessor row numbers (relative) when copy to another sheet. This feature works when copying within the same sheet. The predecessors will update relative to the new row numbers.

AaronO

This is important - I don't combine gantts very often but when I do, I then have to go in and manually rebuild the predecessor relationships, which is a drag because the line numbers are different.

rshiers

Great idea! This is a pain point for my company as well - we have maybe 8 or so templates for types of projects we do on a regular basis.

Without putting these 8 templates in one big Schedule to be used by Control Centre when provisioning a new project. It is not easy to use a previous project as a template (the predecessors drop off).

When we were signing up for Smartsheet, we had the understanding that using templates would be possible. However, not quite the case..

Caravan

Same issues here. I have 4000+ rows and since import from .mpp file messes up with row constraints, move rows to a different location, I'd reverted to converting to .XML first. This has it's inherit issue with SS importing only key data fields. Then to resolve the missing columns (20+), I had to manually copy those into SS. However, SS only allows copying of 500 lines each, I had to repeat the steps until I reach my 4000 lines.

The problem is that I have to sync this everyweek. Yes, I could buy the SS API but the point here is that the import should simply work.

Katherine Britt

Predecessor links should be maintained when copying rows to another sheet

Isadora.Lunardi

Hi, has anyone found a solution for this issue? Or are you doing it manually?

Tim Starkey

Hi @Isadora.Lunardi - doing it manually.

1. select the rows in the source sheet, and copy to new sheet.
2. Copied rows show up at the bottom of the sheet. I select and move them to where I want them in the targe3t sheet.
3. I get the new starting row number for the rows I copied in the target sheet. (row 196 for example)
4. I go into my source sheet and insert rows until the section I previously copied over also starts at row 196. This updates the row numbers in the predecessor column to align with the row numbers in the target sheet
5. I select the predecessor cells for all those rows, and ctrl-c (copy)
6. I go to the first predecessor cell of the copied rows in the target sheet and ctrl-v (paste)

Tim Starkey

@Genevieve P. - I would be OK if you fixed my typo in the original title :)

Genevieve P.

@Tim Starkey haha I didn't even notice it! Fixed. 🙂