I really like Gantt type of timeline visualization, and there is one use case which I’d really like to have: I’d like to have a (possibly long duration) overall task; and when it finishes, I’d like to mark it with a separate Milestone.
Initially, I’ve tried creating a normal task with a long-running Timeline duration; and then another task with a Milestone Timeline, and then I’ve set up the Milestone task to depend on the long-running task - but I’ve ended up in the problem described in Rearrange task tracks in Gantt view? :
Essentially, this is what I want to achieve: The long running D task is visible, the Milestone “D Test 01” is also visible; the arrow clearly indicates visually, that long running task “D” “concludes” with the Milestone “D Test 01”.
However, one cannot set the order of tracks/rows in the Gantt view - so the arrow between “D” and “D Test 01” skips/crosses over another unrelated task (here “R”), which truly messes with my autistic attention to detail: whenever I see that arrow line skipping over something unrelated, even just for a microsecond, I find that so unbelievably irritating - my brain wants to explode! 
:)
However, it is unreasonable to expect that monday.com would cater to my autistic attention to detail and “fix” this, so I started exploring alternatives. And it turns out, you can convert item to subitem (yes! thank you monday.com for implementing this), and so I tried it. There are two main caveats here:
- A subtask/subitem by default does not have a Timeline column - which is what is visualized in Gantt view (and what can be converted to a Milestone); you can choose to create a Timeline column during conversion, intended to be the target for copying of the original Timeline data of the item which is being converted - and the new Timeline column does get created in the newly converted subitem, but the original values do NOT get copied, so you have to re-do this manually
- Once the conversion to subitem is done, delete your old Gantt view, and re-add it again - otherwise the subitem will not be visible, even with a proper Timeline column
That being said, I finally got the right track/row ordering in Gantt view with this change:
Yes! … it’s “D” as first row/track, “D Test 01” as second, and “R” comes after - as it always should have been :) … except:
- Apparently I lost the text label “D Test 01” to the right of the Milestone diamond symbol (compare to previous screenshot) - though I can somewhat live with this
- But, I also lost the arrow line connecting the “D” task with the “D Test 01” Milestone - which starts messing with my autistic level to detail again, and makes me extremely irritated
Now - the visual arrow in Gantt view, was derived from dependencies between tasks. So, I thought, I could try making the milestone subtask “D Test 01” dependent on its parent task, “D”. Unfortunately, it seems that by default, items can only depend on other items - and subitems can only depend on other subitems. And I can see this state in the Main Table view:
Note that:
- The subitem “D Test 01” (with the Milestone Timeline field), has a “Dependency” field
- The parent item “D” (with the usual ranged Timeline), has a “Dependent On” field
So, when I click on the “Dependency” field of “D Test 01” subitem, I only get a choice to “Choose subitems”:
… and to get the arrow I’d want, I’d need to add dependency to an item instead of a subitem. So this “Dependency” field, in itself, would not work in getting back my precious arrow.
So, my question is - is there a workaround here? More specifically:
- What is the “type” of the “Dependent On” field/column for the item?
- I know I can delete the “Dependency” column/field from the subtask/subitem - but could I then add a “Dependent On” field to the subitem, which would list items to link to (in which case, I’d need to know what kind/type of column I need to add)
To summarize: while I understand that, in principle, there is no need to set up an explicit dependency between a subtask and its parent task (because the relationship is inherent in the fact that the subtask is a “child” of its “parent” task, by definition) - again, I’d want to set this kind of dependency up, simply to have the automatic arrow visualization in Gantt view.
So my thinking/hope is: if I could “cheat” and replace the “Dependency” column in the subitem (which does not list items as dependency links), with a “Dependent On” column in the subitem (which would hopefully list items as dependency link) - then I could set up a dependency, which would automatically render an arrow in Gantt view (and my problem would be solved).
Is this somehow possible to do in monday.com web app currrently?
EDIT: just tried deleting the “Dependency” column from the subitem - and then, clicked on + to add a new column, then on the popup window which is shown next scrolled to the bottom and clicked “More columns”, and in the next window “Column Center” searched for “dep” - and added the “Dependency” type column by clicking “Add to board” (note, if you didn’t delete the “Dependency” column previously, the mouseover on the “Add to board” button will tell you “Column usage limit reached” and you will not be able to press the button):
Now, the newly added field is called “Dependent On” - unfortunately, it still lists subitems only:
So - no dice with this approach; any other possible workaround?