Timeline View: Utilization

[AlexLama]

Hello Airtable Community,

We're back with some little big timeline view improvements to make it easier to plan and manage capacity across projects. Here's a high-level summary of the improvements we've made:

1. Re-designed summary bar ☘️

We made the summary bar fully responsive, so values will be visible in most cases. When they're cut off you can now easily mouse over them to see the full value.

We also improved the display of holidays and time off which now show as 'PTO' or whatever custom label you prefer.

2. Drill into tasks & projects 🔎

You can now group by person first and tasks / projects second, allowing you to get a high level picture of your team’s utilization and then drill down into the specific work each person is assigned to.

3. Assign tasks to multiple people 👨‍👨‍👦

It’s pretty common that work is split between multiple people. The resource field now accepts linking to multiple records, which means you can assign as many people to work as necessary. You can further choose to split tasks evenly between assignees, or assign the total cost of the work to each person.

4. Time off 🌴

As mentioned above, you can now customize the label shown for days off — but that's not all:

• It’s now much easier to set up time off. A single button will create the required table, and schema for you to add days off without any difficulty.
• The updated days off table will allow you to set a start date and an end date (optionally) so that you can take multiple days off at once without having to create single records for each individual day.
• You can now also link multiple people to a days off record, so if the whole team is taking time off for Christmas, you can track that in a single record.

Other updates and feedback 📣

We have a few other updates coming your way soon such as:

• Collapse Timeline groups by default — if you're using Timeline view primarily as a utilization heat map, the collapsed view can be pretty useful, so we're allowing builders to toggle this by default in interfaces. 
• Smarter summary calculations — we're making some under-the-hood improvements to how we calculate utilization across weeks, in short, the values you see will be more reflective of actual utilization.

Jump into one of your Timeline views today to try these updates yourself. As always, we highly value your input and suggestions, please continue to share your feedback here as well as your ideas on how we can improve our products on the Community Product Ideas board. We look forward to sharing more improvements with you in the coming months.

[DW_Alexa]

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you can already assign to users, however you are then more limited in how you can define your availability. For example you cannot set specific hours available for each person, or days off. We do however have a separate ongoing work stream to eventually bring parity between the user field and using separate linked tables for people.

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@AlexLamaI was wondering if there had been any updates to bring together the user field and separate linked tables for people. I'm setting up our team's first base, which has multiple tables containing different types of work assignments, and we need to be able to see all assignments by person. To my knowledge that's only currently possible if you are using a separate table for people and linking records in the task tables to the people table, but then we can't use the Current User view in interfaces. Is there a solution for this yet, or any updates on this? 

If not, you mentioned resource allocation still working with users instead of linked records, could you explain how you could modify the resource utilization examples given to work with users instead? I was thinking of setting up an automation to link the records behind the scenes whenever a user is chosen, but I'm new to this so I bet there's a more elegant/effective way to make this work.

Thank you!

[paul-morrill]

I found a workaround for the "current users" issue. On your people table, add a user field along with whatever other info you want to belong to each person. Then, for example, if the people table's record is for "John Smith", also select the user "John Smith" in that record's the user field. (An easy way to make sure you have the right user selected for the record is to have the record name be a formula that outputs the content of the user field — "John Smith" user = "John Smith" record name.) Then in your assignments table, in addition to a linked record from the people table for the assignee, add a lookup that pulls in the assignee's user field. At the data level, it looks inelegant bc you'll have the assignee field that says "John Smith" and the looked-up user field that also says "John Smith", but at the interface level it'll let you use the lookup field for filtering by current user.

[Rcoltey]

@AlexLama is there a way to edit the colors of the utilization boxes? I don't want 100% to be Red. I'm trying to make 101% start the Red and 90-100% be Orange. Everything Else Green.