Annual School Operations Calendar

Hi again,

Have a poke around on Youtube and the Smartsheet Webinars (you will find the Webinars link below in the blue footer on this page). There is also Videos, worksheet and guides galore in the Help/Support Centre. 

While these mig thbe quite involved, it will offer a great visual tool to give  yu an idea on how to VISUALISE what you want to achieve.

Project settings can be tricky to navigate, so keep it simple and make it work for you, not the other way around. 

To begin I would look to open a new Sheet using a Project with Dependancies template form the Home Tab across the top of your page. 

Keep all of the settings and formatting so you can really see what is going on and how each task (Sports Carnival, Family Day, Band Performance etc in your case) is relative to the whole task (in your case the School Year). 

Each Task has subtask:

Sports DAy 2017 - main task (Parent Row/Task)

  Ground preparations

  Book Bus for travelling Students

  Purchase additional Stop watches

  Order additional Icy Poles for Canteen

^^^^^^^^^^^^ - these are all Sub tasks (Child tasks), you can also move into further details with GrandChild tasks

You can allocate who the task if assigned to

the Due date for the subtasks (in a project template the Parent row Due Date will be influenced by the duration of the children tasks)

You can set reminders, ask for an update request, send yourself alerts when people action or update their tasks so yu can keep good visibility on the 'project' as a whole.

You can attach quotes from vendors so everyone can review and respond, you can add comments to the task if you call and leave a message for someone etc. 

Once you establish these fundamental points, you can then look further into 'dependancies' - this basically means that one task is dependant on another task. For example Sports Day is depndant on Ground Maintenance  - if Ground Mainteneance is delayed, this will push out the date of Sports Day 2017 (which sounds a bit extreme) but the concept is that things happen in an order, some are depandent on other tasks being cmpleted, while something like buy icy poles, isn't dependant on ground maintenance, so this will not be affected by ground maintenance delays, but might be affected if Fundraising is delayed or the due date passes.

There is so much to learn, and even more once you have learnt what you need to know. Don't be afraid to simply give it a go. Watch some youtube videos, have a good look around the Help Centre here and play with teh teplate so you understand how and why it works so well.