Relative dates in templates

[wowi]

I have defined a template for business trips which looks (simplified)
as follows:

business trip
preparation
organising trip
fill in application at company
organise hotel
organise train / flight
....
organising meeting
get / provide agenda
...
doing
postprocessing
postprocess trip
collect receipts
apply for reimbursement
check payment
entry payment in tax-program
....
postprocess trip
get / write minutes
....

It's nice to have everything in place just by copy and paste.

But I haven't found a way to automate the dating of the activities:

The trip will start at day x. thus, the preparation have all to be
finished before the day x. The trip itself starts at day x, and the
postprocessing does not start before one day after day x. It is even a
little bit more complicated because the activities are organised more
deeply in order to collect tasks which should be done in sequentially
and allow tasks to appear in parallel on the todo list if they are
independently of each other . Some tasks of preparation phase and
postprocessing phase have different start and end dates.

Is there a possibility to get these kind of dates automatically into
the system when creating a new instance of the template? Some
possibility for relative dates to the day of the business trip (e.g.
one week after day x, two weeks before day x)? If that is not possible,
do you think this is a feature worth to integrate in some future
version of MLO?

Wolfgang

[David Solomon]

I have the same need - what I do is have an XLS with all the tasks (subject,
start date, due date) and I have all the start/due dates computed from a
single cell (the "trip date") - that way I have complete flexibility on
deltas for things to do before and after a trip.

I then import the tasks into Outlook from the XLS file and sync w/MLO. I
suppose I could import into MLO - just haven't gotten that working (I took a
look at the import options and nothing was a simple as importing into
Outlook, which reads XLS and comma or tab separated text files)

[Andrey Tkachuk (MLO)]

There is one workaround for relative dates which is possible in MLO
now.

The first level subtasks of a recurrent task will be recalculated
automatically if you complete this recurring task.
So if you create "business trip" task as a recurring task say as 1 day
after completion the dates of its subtasks will be recalculated on
completion or on skip occurrence action for this recurring task.

Andrey.

[Mandie Kramer]

Do they also recalculate if you copy and paste the recurring task with its sub-tasks, or simply change the date of the parent recurring task?