Change several tasks at once

Q: Why is Change... greyed out in the Grid?

No row is selected yet. Select one or more rows first. Change... appears for people who can edit tasks in the project.

All plans Project Member

Moving forty tasks to a new sprint, handing a phase to someone else, or pushing a batch of due dates out by a week should not mean opening forty tasks. The Grid and the Gantt both let you select many rows and change them in one step, and one Undo puts the whole batch back.

Both views use the same dialog and the same rules, so what you learn in one works in the other.

Open the Grid or the Gantt

Open a project and open the Tasks tab under the project header.
Select Grid, the spreadsheet view, or Gantt. The views read List, Gantt, Board, Grid and Calendar.

Select rows

In the Grid

Click a row to select it. The row number at the left is a safe place to click.
Ctrl-click (Cmd-click on a Mac) adds a row to the selection, or takes it out.
Shift-click selects every row between the row you clicked last and this one.
Shift+↓ or Shift+↑ extends the selection one row at a time, from any cell. The caret leaves the cell while you do this, so typing cannot change one row of several. A plain arrow key or Esc afterwards goes back to a single row, with the caret in the column you left.
Ctrl+A (Cmd+A) selects every row on screen, when no cell is being edited. Press it again to clear them.

A range follows the rows as they are drawn, so the subtasks of a collapsed parent are never swept in. The toolbar shows how many rows are selected.

On the Gantt

The same gestures work on the task list and on the bars: Ctrl-click or Cmd-click to add or remove a row, Shift-click for a range, and Shift+↓ or Shift+↑ from the keyboard. A plain click on a bar still opens the what-if preview.

With two or more rows selected, a bar appears in the Gantt toolbar with the count, Change…, and a delete button.

Change the selected tasks

Select the rows.
Select Change…: in the Grid toolbar, or in the Gantt’s selection bar. The dialog is titled Change N tasks, where N is the number of rows selected.
Change the fields you want. Each field shows the value the selected tasks share, or Mixed where they differ.
Select Apply.

The fields are Status, Priority, Assignee, % Done, Start date, Due date, Sprint and Epic.

Only the fields you change are written. Leave a field as it is and every task keeps its own value.
To clear a field, choose Unassigned for Assignee, None for Sprint or Epic, or empty a date.
Status and % Done move together, as they do on a single task. Setting Status to Done fills % Done to 100, and setting % Done to 100 marks the task Done. A combination the two cannot hold, such as Done at 80%, is refused in the dialog before anything is sent.
% Done takes a whole number from 0 to 100.
Nothing is written until Apply. Cancel, Esc or the close button leave every task as it was.

What is left alone

A change lands on every row it can, and the rest are left as they were and counted:

Summary rows keep their rolled-up dates and progress. A parent’s dates and % Done come from the tasks under it, so a new start date, due date or % Done goes to the other rows only. The dialog says so when your selection includes summary rows. Status, priority, assignee, sprint and epic still change on them.
A task whose start would fall after its due date is skipped. Moving one date on many tasks meets a different other date on each, and Onplana will not guess a second date for you. A message counts the tasks skipped this way.
Tasks you are not allowed to edit are not changed, and a message says how many could not be updated. The rest still land.
If every selected task already has the values you chose, a message says so and nothing is sent.

Undo

After a change, a message says how many tasks changed and offers Undo for about eight seconds. One click puts every row back as it was.

On the Gantt the change also joins the toolbar’s Undo list, so Undo in the toolbar, or Ctrl+Z (Cmd+Z), reverses it after the message has gone. See Plan on the Gantt chart.

Delete several tasks

In the Grid, select the rows and use the delete button in the toolbar, or press Ctrl+Delete (Cmd+Delete). A plain Delete inside a cell erases text, as in a spreadsheet.
On the Gantt, use the delete button in the selection bar, or press Delete once the caret is off the cells (a Ctrl-click, Shift-click or Shift+Arrow already takes it off).

Deleting does not stop to ask. Subtasks go with their parents, and one Undo brings the whole selection back from the recycle bin. Deleting needs permission to delete tasks in the project.

Set a scheduling constraint on several tasks

The Grid toolbar also has a Constraint… menu that sets or clears the scheduling constraint on the selected rows, taking each task’s own start or due date. See See and set constraints across the plan.

FAQs

Why is Change… greyed out in the Grid? No row is selected yet. Select one or more rows first. Change… appears for people who can edit tasks in the project.

Why is there no Change… button on the Gantt? The Gantt shows it once two or more rows are selected. For a single task, double-click the row to open the task.

I changed the start date but some tasks did not move. They are summary rows, whose dates come from the tasks under them, or tasks whose new start would have fallen after their due date. Both are counted in the messages after you apply.

Can I change custom fields or tags this way? Not from this dialog. It covers status, priority, assignee, % Done, the two dates, sprint and epic.

Work with tasks, the fields on a single task
Plan on the Gantt chart, selecting, indenting and undoing on the timeline
Link task dependencies, constraints and how they pin dates
Restore from the recycle bin, where deleted tasks go

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