How to enter 'Remaining Duration' (instead of % Complete)

Genevieve, thank you sooo much for taking the time to respond. I'm new to smart sheets. I evaluated it a few years back but at the time it didn't support critical path or baselines so I didn't pursue it. I'm back evaluating it because I see the power of the whole collaboration piece, like Google sheets. I've been using MS Project for 20+ years and have many templates, reports, macros, views, fields etc. built up over that period. It is a bit strange to me, that bedrock items such as 'remaining duration' 'actual duration' 'free slack' 'total slack' etc. aren't default items in smart sheets. Or the ability to push remaining parts of a task to the future.

Updating tasks by entering % complete is poor practice in my view, much better practice is to update 'remaining duration'. Now I need to work out how to enter remaining duration and have the % complete update, I'll give that a go.

Thanks again, Mike

Hi again Genevieve, I've played around some more. The only default scheduling parameters I see are Start Finish Duration % Complete Baseline Start Baseline Finish and Variance. After that you have to code everything, so no Remaining Duration, no Free Slack, no Total Slack amongst a host of others. You've given me code for Remaining Duration but you can't really code that, MS Project allows you to write a value to e.g. Remaining Duration or if you don't, it will. And that's important as best practice is to update a schedule by entering the Actual Start (one time only) and then entering Remaining Duration.

And there doesn't appear to be a method to move incomplete parts forward. So you'd have to manually move any finish date that was late.

And then lastly it doesn't appear you can create views and tables so for every column you need, it's in your Gantt chart or grid view. So you'd be adding and hiding columns the whole time. 

For sure there are some nice features, the online collaboration, the chat, attaching files to tasks and so on. I'd love to be convinced otherwise but from what I can see I couldn't envisage smartsheet as a replacement for MSP.

I've asked several colleagues of mine from different countries. Only one of them was using smartsheet and his organisation uses Agile. I would love to connect with people who have successfully transitioned from MSP to SS.

Mike