Today we're excited to release three new features that will greatly improve Project Management workflows in Airtable. These include a new gantt layout option, date dependencies which work across views and a better way to preview utilization when assigning tasks.
1. Gantt in interfaces
If you ever wondered why we needed two separate views for timeline and gantt, so did we. Gantt is now a layout option within timeline view. This means you can now view and manage dependent tasks within interfaces or anywhere else you have a timeline view, by selecting gantt in the new layout toggle.
2. Date dependency configuration
Powering the new gantt option in timeline is the ability to configure date dependencies which work across all of your views and interfaces. So if you connect two tasks in a timeline view but then edit the dates elsewhere, the dates will reschedule accordingly regardless. This is particularly powerful if you are working with the same data in multiple views for different people.
Key points about date dependency configuration
- Once you set them up, date dependencies will work in any view or interface.
- Whenever tasks are rescheduled, a toast will appear allowing you to undo the action.
- If you end up with invalid dependencies, we’ll show a message in the bottom left on the screen. You can click on this to view the invalid dependencies and fix them at the click of a button.
- If you don't care about dependencies you can still use this feature to set up a start, end, and duration field which are all editable and stay in sync with one another.
3. See who's free when assigning tasks
When assigning tasks, you can preview your team's utilization before and after assigning the task to them, for the given start and end date of that task.
You can set this up for any assignee or resource element which you are already using for utilization elsewhere in your app. All you have to do is select the field and toggle ‘preview utilization’.
Coming soon: dynamic filtering
These features allow you to compare utilization when choosing team members, but imagine you also wanted to filter the selection to people who have the required skills, role or team for a task. Very soon we'll be releasing a feature which allows you to filter record selection dynamically, which means the filter can depend on a property of the task you are trying to assign someone to. This feature will not only help with resource allocation but numerous other use cases, such as filtering offices to a given location, or products to a given vendor.
Templates for Project Management and Resource Allocation
We've put together two new templates to make it easier to show how you can use these new features to build compelling apps for your team's workflows. We hope these can help to inspire your own creations (which I'd love to hear about in the comments below).
👉 Resource allocation template
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