Date Dependencies - How to cascade dates when updating to earlier end date?

[rschl]

Hi all,

I've had some questions from my (project managers in higher ed) team regarding the brand new Date Dependencies feature, which overall is a big help and a good replacement for my previous formula field workaround.

1. When updating predecessor dates to complete earlier than originally expected, dependencies do not shift earlier. Is there a way to make dependent start dates sticky to the predecessor's end date? Our current workaround after updating the task's duration is to delete all task start and end dates and start again with task #1's start date. 
2. Similarly, when adding a new task in the middle of a timeline, we've found that adding the task duration and adding predecessor links does not trigger cascading dates unless that task's new end date overlaps with its dependent.
3. We're also interested in support for dependent tasks starting on the parent task's end date rather than the day after -- it doesn't look like this is supported within date dependencies.

[ScottWorld]

Unfortunately, these things are not possible with Airtable’s date dependency feature.

Be sure to submit all 3 of these feature requests to support@airtable.com.

Now this is kinda convoluted and definitely not an ideal setup, but you could use Monday.com as sort of a hack/workaround for this, since Monday offers all of this functionality that you’re looking for.

You could create all of your date-dependent tasks in Monday, and make updates to all of your date-dependent tasks there as well.

Just keep your task list to the bare minimum in Monday — task name, start date, end date. 

Then, you could set Make’s Monday.com automations to automatically watch & monitor any changes that happen to any of your tasks in Monday.

As soon as Make detects a change in Monday, all of those changes would be immediately & automatically sent to Airtable using Make’s Airtable automations.

Like I mentioned above, this isn’t ideal, but it could solve your issue!

p.s. If you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with any of this, feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable Consulting — ScottWorld