Ignore rolled-up progress values in formulas

Nick D. shared this idea 2 years ago
Voting Open

When a formula uses the task progress value, it makes no distinction between manual (user-entered) progress values and rolled-up (calculated) values. If task roll-up is enabled in the same tree as a formula that reads progress values across descendants, this leads to incorrect results. A rolled-up task is treated as a manual task, resulting in double-counting and skewed averages. Preferably, the formula should ignore rolled-up progress values. At the moment I can't think of a use case for a formula that counts or calculates progress of both manual tasks and rolled up tasks.

Replies (1)

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This is a good idea but I think the choice to include or exclude rolled-up task values should be optional, and the ability to do the opposite (ie, apply the formula only to rolled-up values) should be an option as well.

I take your point about the potential for double-counting when using formulas to establish averages, sums or counts of progress values at the central or main topic level in sub-topics if rolled-up values in parent topics can't be excluded. However, I can think of a few formulas that would be useful at the parent or sub-topic level regardless of whether a roll-up is involved.

One example would be where a simple formula is used, say, to create a topic property to show progress on individual topics as a percentage value. This sort of formula may in fact be more useful at times at the rolled-up level.

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Thanks Alex. I agree, all options would be ideal, but if I had to choose just one then it would be for formulas to ignore rolled-up progress. I came across this while looking for a solution to the issue that roll-up does not observe filtering. This is failsafe design and prevents the accidental display of misleading status. However it would be very useful to get a view of how complete the P1 tasks are (for example) by filtering on P1. Fortunately formulas do observe filtering so a solution is possible, but it does not coexist with rollup.

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I see your point and I think it would work, provided this limitation were applied only to rolled-up progress and only in formulas involving the sum, average, count etc of descendant or child topics.

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