How to Create Project Schedule In Smartsheet Easily 2026

Log in and land on the Recents tab, which lists the sheets, reports, and dashboards you've touched most recently along with their location in your workspace. If you're setting up a new project, this is also where the Create button in the top right lives, the fastest route into a fresh schedule instead of digging through folders for an old one.

Click Create and a dropdown opens with every item type you can start: Sheet, Report, Dashboard, Form, or Import, plus a Workspace option if you're organizing a brand-new project from the ground up. Each item type with an arrow expands into sub-options, including starting a sheet blank or from a template.

Instead of building tracking columns by hand, look for the Project Schedule Management template in the gallery. Its description spells out what it's built for: managing the work required to initiate, plan, and launch a project using predecessors, dependencies, and duration to monitor your schedule and visualize adjustments.

It's marked Medium complexity, a fair warning that it comes with more moving parts than a blank sheet, but those parts are what a real schedule needs. Click Create from template to generate your own copy.

Once your sheet is created, list out your tasks in rows and use the indent and outdent controls in the toolbar to nest subtasks underneath their parent phase. A clean parent-child structure, like a Design Phase row with Wireframes and Mockups indented beneath it, is what lets Smartsheet later roll up progress and dates from individual tasks up to the phase and project level.

Smartsheet's automatic date-shifting lives behind a setting it calls Dependencies, not a separate engine you install. Right-click any column header (or use the settings icon in the top right of Gantt view) and choose Project Settings, then open Dependency Settings.

Check Dependencies enabled, and pick which columns to use as your Predecessor and Duration columns; Smartsheet creates them for you if they don't already exist. Two things matter before you flip this on.

It's limited to the Smartsheet, Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans, and only a sheet's Owner or an Admin can turn it on. It also disables formulas in the Start Date, End Date, Duration, % Complete, and Predecessors columns, so decide upfront whether you need those cells calculated by dependencies or by your own formulas, since you can't have both at once.

Enter predecessor row numbers in the Predecessors column to connect tasks that depend on one another, such as a Testing Phase that can't start until Development finishes. The default relationship is Finish-to-Start: a plain row number like 3 means start after row 3 finishes.

Other relationship types and lag time are available for cases where two tasks should start together or overlap by a few days (see the table below). With Dependencies enabled, moving the end date on Development automatically pushes Testing's start date to match, keeping downstream milestones honest without manual rework.

Switch to Gantt Chart view to see your whole schedule laid out visually, with bars representing task durations and dependency lines connecting related work. Add RYG (red, yellow, green) status balls to a column so overdue or at-risk tasks are visible at a glance, which is what turns this from a planning tool into something you can run status meetings off of.