Project Plan: Fast Editing + Other Handy Updates!

The new Project Planning screen is great as it allows the quick "spreadsheet" style entry of milestones and tasks coupled with a real-time Gantt schedule: As you add dependencies, shuffle dates or even delete rows, the schedule automatically adjusts.

However, over the last month we've become more aware of performance problems in the planning screen, especially for projects that span for 12months or more. Our team have spent some time re-optimizing the date calculations so if you were affected by long save/loading times, this should be a much better experience now.

No more coffee breaks waiting for planning screen edits to finish!

While you're here, it's worth mentioning a few other recent fixes and improvements around the Projects module:

More blank rows when editing the plan

By default the Project Plan starts with 30 blank rows. So, if you're not using a template, once you fill these rows, you have to manually insert 1 row at a time. That's a bit tedious... so we've simply upped the starting rows to 100! Down the track we'll look at way to easily insert new blank rows.

$ Budget and Hours column values fix

Initially we were trying to be clever about when to show the $ and Hours values, depending on how you were calculating the budget and rolling up the values.

However, it's become clear that we should just always show the selected value and let the user mouse-over a value to see the sub-total amount (if relevant).

Newly split task goes under existing task

Lots of users have told us how handy the Split Task feature (from the Project Overview tab) is, but having the newly split task drop to the bottom of the task list was - in most cases - unhelpful. We've tweaked things so now it sits under the task it was just split from!

Project manager can be unassigned

Having a project without a manager sounds like a bad way to keep on top of things, but we've heard that sometimes it's just preferable to quickly set-up new projects and then decide who's going to manage it later : )

Project Invoicing - Milestone Status column

Before you invoice the client, it can be important to confirm that the project has indeed started, or that certain tasks have been completed. You can now easily confirm the status of tasks and milestones as you invoice for them!

 Thanks for keeping up to date with all the changes!