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Rescheduling a group of tasks Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
My question is related to rescheduling a group of tasks.
I created a reasonably complex task structure and grouped tasks in groups.
When I try to reschedule a group of tasks by changing the group attributes in the inspector, it changes start and end dates for the group only, not for the underlying tasks. How can I move the whole group of connected tasks in time? It will take me otherwise a day to move them and their dependances individually one by one.

Thanks!
Yuri
 
1) If you want to move several tasks to all start on the *same* date, then you can select all the tasks you want to change (by dragging or shift-clicking) and then use the inspector to change all their start dates to the same thing with just a couple more clicks.

2) If you want to move several tasks the same number of days into the future (for example, Monday's task to Wednesday, Tuesday's task to Thursday, etc.), then it depends on how you've set their start dates in the first place.
If you select a task and it says "On Specified Date" in the task inspector, then you are going to have to change that task's date directly. This occurs when you manually set task's start dates in the inspector or drag them in the Gantt chart.
If the inspector says "As soon as constraints allow", then changing whatever the constraint is (a group start date, a pre-requisite task's end date, etc.) should have a ripple effect and move everything together.
If the inspector says "By resource availability", then you need to tweak the resource's schedule and/or relevel the project to see the desired changes.

If that doesn't help, maybe you can give more specifics or a screenshot here or via email to our ninjas: omniplan@omnigroup.com
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Note to everyone: You should only be scheduling a task "On specified date" if there's sort of a formal, external date involved, and you don't want this task moving around just because others are. For example, a company-wide meeting, a pre-announced ship date, the day a government official is coming for an inspection, etc.
 
...or you could select all relevant tasks and press Reset in the task inspector: all subtasks will revert to as early as constraints allow, and should be draggable by group.

Actually kwispel I think you have hit upon a major conceptual shortcoming of OmniPlan: simply dragging a task bar converts it to start on a specific date. It is easy to suppose that by dragging tasks within a group you are setting up the temporal relationships between them, but you are not: you are setting each task to a specific date and in effect breaking the relationships, so that if the group bar is dragged, the previously dragged tasks do not move with it.

In order to establish relationships between tasks in a group without anchoring tasks to specific dates you have to use dependencies, and if you want a gap between tasks you have to specify a lead time in the Task/Dependencies inspector.

On the face of it OmniPlan seems to offer very direct and intuitive setting up of schedules by dragging, but in practice it is all too easy to tie yourself in knots by inadvertently assigning fixed dates. There are a couple of things which I think would help a lot:
1) Make dependency lines draggable, so that by dragging the arrowhead, lead times could be set up graphically.
2) Make groups modifier-draggable so that all (unlocked) tasks move in unison with the group task without changing their relationships.

I am not convinced by the logic that assigns specific dates to all dragged tasks (especially since constraints and locking are both available to tell OmniPlan: “hey, this task really has to start on or after this date”), but since that is the way OP works, at least it should be made possible for users to drag things around without upsetting relationships.
 
Quote:
2) Make groups modifier-draggable so that all (unlocked) tasks move in unison with the group task without changing their relationships.
I have just realised that it is possible now to drag multiple selections in OmniPlan, but being sure of selecting the group bar and all contained tasks is still quite a klunky operation, and is liable to throw up a lot of violations. Option-dragging the group bar horizontally would achieve the same effect much more easily, and provided that no constraints were violated, should have the effect of saying to OP "I am doing this deliberately, so please don't ask me about violations."
 
 


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