Working with Dates in a Template

[davrizio]

I have a list of tasks that don't change from month to month except the date and I would like to create a new project based on the template's milestone dates relative to each other without entering new dates for all of the milestones...for example:

Project 1 start date June 1
Group A start date June 2
milestone 1 date June 2
milestone 2 date June 5
milestone 3 date June 9

I would like to make this a template and use for another project with different dates but be able to maintain the relationship between them...make sense?

OP does exactly what I want when I change from Undetermined Date to Specifying a Start Date in the Project Inspector... OP justs starts with today's date and doesn't do it if I go and change the date...

Is there a way to do this? Thanks!

[Lizard]

Yes, this is a current limitation (bug?) in OmniPlan. Another user pointed this out to us nearly a year ago (http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=1437), but we haven't gotten to it yet. If this is a problem for other users, please let us know (mailto:omniplan@omnigroup.com) so we can adjust our priorities and get this addressed sooner rather than later.

[Ken Case]

If all the milestones dates are all relative to each other, you can create dependencies between them and set lead times on the dependencies.

To achieve your example above, assuming a work week that includes weekends (since your Milestone 1 date of June 2 falls on the weekend), you would make Milestone 2 depend on Milestone 1 with a lead time of +3d (bringing it to June 5), then make Milestone 3 depend on Milestone 2 with a lead time of +4d (bringing it to June 9). Because the milestones are all linked you can now drag Milestone 1 to any date (e.g. July 2) and the other milestones will follow along (e.g. to July 5 and July 9).

Is that what you were trying to accomplish?

[davrizio]

Thanks Ken and Lizard for your help!

Since I had the template with the milestones and dependencies with the right relation to each other all I needed is to change the start date of the project. When the project template has a date specified the milestone dates do not stay relative to the project start date when the project date is changed. The only time it does is when you change from an undetermined date to specifying a date and then it is the current date as the start date.

Here is what I ended up doing, which is kind of clunky but hey it works. I changed my Macs date and the changed my template date from Undetermined to Specify date and I'm good to go... this is something I don't mind doing but when I want to train someone to use the templates I was hoping not to include this step...