Target date to be so many days before timeline end date

[Helen1988 (Helen Warburton)]

Hi,
We have several boards which are all linked together with our board called “Full Timeline”. The Status and Timeline are mirrored on all of the boards. The Full Timeline has the dependencies on it.
On this board I would like a Target Date - this is based on the Timeline on the Full Timeline board.
I would like the Target Date to be 2 days before the end date of the timeline.
Is this possible? I have tried to set an automation as “2 days before Timeline End Date arrives then set Target Date to Today”. However, this does not automatically set the date when the timeline is built.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[mark.anley (Green Llamas Consulting)]

Hello @Helen1988. You could achieve this by having your target date as a Formula column rather than a Date column, this way you do not need to depend on automations. You can use the following formula to manage this:

FORMAT_DATE(SUBTRACT_DAYS({Timeline#End},2),“YYYY-MM-DD”)

As the timeline dates change your target date will change along with it.

Please note, if you have other automations, etc based off your target date then this solution may not work the best for you.

Hope this helps,
Mark

[Helen1988 (Helen Warburton)]

Hi,
Thank you so much for your quick reply and I can see how this would work - however, mine comes up with Illegal Formula.
Would this formula only work if all of my timeline dates were across several dates? For example, some of our timeline dates are only 1 day for that task.

[mark.anley (Green Llamas Consulting)]

Hi Helen - the copy paste can be a bit funny when copying directly from the forums, you can try just typing it in and it should help.

And yes this will work for milestone dates as well:

[Helen1988 (Helen Warburton)]

Ah ha! Yes you were right - thank you very much

[mark.anley (Green Llamas Consulting)]

No problem at all Helen, glad to help!