New Project Management Features Added

[Rosalind_Lutsky]

Hi there! I’m Rosalind – a product marketing manager at Airtable focused on helping teams build powerful, custom applications that make work more efficient. Building on our project management-focused release back in February, I’m happy to share the release of 3 new features that will help teams manage bigger, and more complex projects with ease.

With this launch, we’re introducing advanced date dependencies, gridlines, and grouping. Coming soon, we will also be releasing expanded support for dynamic filtering. These features will be rolling out to all Teams+ customers throughout the day. Note that advanced date dependencies will only be available on Business plans or higher. 

What’s new

Advanced date dependencies

With advanced date dependencies, you can get even more granular with how you organize fields and views. For instance, you can now set fixed buffers for date dependencies, add descriptive helper text, and more.

  

Gridlines

On displays that use a date field, you can now more easily discern between dates with added gridlines.

Grouping

Group different fields together to quickly see what work is on the horizon. For example, on a project where you need to track multiple tasks & task types, you can group information in a timeline view by both project and task type, as shown in the image below.

As we continue to build out our project management features, please share any feedback you have and what you'd like to see next! 

[alxwlfe_airbnb]

Can't wait — thanks to you & the team for these features 🙏

[Howard_Shaw]

Do you know if there will be support for date and time fields with the ability to set working hours? We are running manufacturing production projects and projects take 2-5 weeks with a myriad of tasks ranging from 15 minutes to several hours. 

[seanpmgallagher]

@Howard_Shaw were desperately in need of this feature as well!

[Rosalind_Lutsky]

@Howard_Shaw @seanpmgallagher really appreciate your feedback! I've shared the request with the team – I know this is something on their radar. Where specifically are you hoping to use the working hours? Would it be for the Gantt/timeline views or would you want to build automations/dependencies around it?

[seanpmgallagher]

@Rosalind_Lutsky both would be ideal, but our primary use case would be in the dependencies fields for the newer project management features that have been implemented recently. Those fields currently don’t support a date field when there is a time associated with it.  Referencing this support article https://support.airtable.com/docs/date-dependencies-in-airtable# under “Using date dependencies in Airtable”

[ScottWorld]

Hi @Rosalind_Lutsky,

A few of my Airtable consulting clients are unable to use the timelines in interfaces, because the overarching problem is that there is no feature parity across the 3 different timelines that Airtable now offers.

The 3 different timelines that Airtable offers are:

1. Timeline views in the data layer. This is the only timeline that my clients can use, because this is the only one that offers the full feature set.

2. Timeline interface page. My clients cannot use this, because this timeline does not offer the "summarize" function that exists in the timeline view in the data layer. The "summarize" function enables them to see summary totals for each group, and summary totals for all records at the bottom of the timeline.

3. Timeline element for dashboard pages. My clients cannot use this timeline either. That's because even though this timeline has the "summarize" function that is missing from #2 above, this timeline doesn't have the "edit records inline" function that #1 and #2 have.

Can you please work on bringing full feature parity to all 3 of the timelines that are currently in Airtable?

There really shouldn't be a difference between different timeline features across the product line. There should only be one set of timeline features that are 100% identical across the entire product line.

As it stands now, my clients are unable to use timelines in interfaces, because each of the timeline interfaces are missing key features.

Can you please work on bringing feature parity to all of the timelines across the product?

Thank you!

— ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

[ashley_24]

Loving these project management feature updates - especially the grouping abilities in interface views. Keep them coming!! 😁

[motion-ryan]

Gantt Chart Clarity through Alternate Week Coloring
Add a feature to alternate the color of the weeks on the gantt chart to improve readability. This simple enhancement would significantly benefit me and my team, making it easier to track the start and end of each week.

[Howard_Shaw]

@Rosalind_Lutsky we would be using it for both visualization and automations.  But I'm also optimistic it would cut down on the automations we have to run since right now our scheduling uses scripting automations to deal with these dependencies taking into account duration of task, working hours, and holidays.