Not sure what I’m missing here. I’m moving over to Monday from Smartsheet.
We use Gantt Charts for projects (we work in construction).
I used the Single Project Template to get started. Created all of my traditional tasks and ownership. Have the Timeline and Duration and Dependent elements on.
I’m having an issue where I’m moving over my old schedules to Monday.
Anytime I add a duration to a task, it immediately marks the timeline from TODAY. I have to go back in and redit the element to match the old schedule.
What am I doing wrong, because I’m investing TONS of time into getting these lined out.
Something that would take me at max 10 min to build an entire schedule is taking an hour.
Hi @TrocoChris - when adding a duration it should only default the timeline start to Today if the timeline is currently blank. Otherwise it should base it on the current entered start date.
If this is not happening, I would advise reaching out to support@monday.com as this sounds like a bug.
Hi@TrocoChris,
The reason why the timeline is being marked from today is because the default setting for the Timeline column is “Start Date + Duration”. This means that the timeline will show the start date of the task plus the duration of the task. To change this setting, you can go to the column settings and change the Timeline calculation to “Start Date”.
Where is the column setting? The three tabs next to timeline don’t give me an option to change “timeline calculation”.
Here’s how I traditionally would build a schedule previously in smarthsheet.
Insert Tasks as appropriate.
Set dependencies
The first task date entered (in our case is contract receipt date)
Fill in durations, and the timeline will auto populate.
If you set the dependency type to strict (setting within the dependency column), the dates will calculate automatically. However, note that it won’t write the dates. You can enter a random date and it’ll correct it to the appropriate date to respect your dependency.
So the fastest way to do it is to set all your durations and dependencies, then go through your tasks and add some random dates that will be automatically changed to the correct date right away.
Thanks for your quick reply… that works in populating the start dates. Now my challenge is how to best populate the timeline. I see a few different directions to go but there seems to be a lot of one-way functionality. I see an option to make the timeline reflect two columns with start and end dates but edits to the timeline don’t update the start end dates. What approach or best practices are you using to replicate the SS functionality?
I just made this gif, you can see the different behaviour when you use strict dependency type. As you can see it works for timeline columns. I just clicked on Nov 1st and it moved it to May 19th while keeping the same duration
Edit: actually if your dependency has already been set, simply entering a duration will auto-populate the timeline to the correct dates. So the fastest way to do it would be to set dependency first then duration and no need to worry about touching the timeline column.
The problem I have Bob is that does work. But as we know in the real world things change.
So now, if I have a start to finish timeline setup. When I change one of the other dates, it will not change the rest of them. It will allow them to overlap for some reason.
Hey Chris, I believe your issue might be within your schedule logic. If you use a start to finish dependency, it is possible for tasks to overlap. If the duration of your driven task increases, the predecessor won’t change its end date to avoid overlap because that’s not how this dependency type works.
I personally avoid SF dependencies because they are much more prone to logical planning errors and are much more complex to control. If you could share a screenshot I could check whether my suspicions are correct and help you rewrite that dependecy as a finish to start.
They are all Finish to Start. If something gets delayed and I adjust the TIMELINE date to the actual finish date, it won’t push the dependent items down.
This is very weird. It all seems to be set up correctly. If you change the duration of contract award to 2 days, does the timeline of Product Data move to Sep 29-30?
I just had a flashback of a weird behaviour that I discovered a couple weeks ago. If you copy/paste a dependency from one board to another, the dependency will be displayed on the new board and it visually looks all fine but the dependency actually won’t work. So if you copy/pasted that dependency from another board, try deleting the dependency and doing it again but this time manually.
When it doesn’t I have to delete all the timelines AND durations preceding the current date and then manually put the durations back in to start populating timelines.
This happens about 80% of the time.
Yes, we have a template that I’ve created as our project workflow is the same regardless of project (for the most part).
Creating a new board based on custom templates with pre-set dependencies works fine for me, it’s really just when I copy/paste a dependency from one board to another that it doesn’t work at all.
Hopefully the sequencing becomes more stable in the future. The dependency types feature is still in Beta so maybe that’s just a weird bug you’re encountering. I’ve had a few rare occasions where I set a dependency then came back to the board only to see the dates were off by a few days, but it’s been nowhere near 80% of the time for me. Forcing a recalculation by changing the duration fixed it for me.
Yeah, the sad part is that it’s increased my work time reworking schedules over and over again. Doubting the switch to Monday from SS, as I could knock them out very vast and never had issues with SS.
