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, which is the fastest route into a fresh schedule rather than 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 of the item types with an arrow expands into sub-options, including starting a sheet blank or from a template.

Rather than building tracking columns by hand, look for the Project Schedule Management template in the gallery. Its description spells out exactly 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, which is a fair warning that it comes with more moving parts than a blank sheet, but those parts are exactly 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.

In your sheet's project settings, enable dependencies so that task timelines can shift automatically instead of requiring you to manually update every date when something slips. Once it's on, Smartsheet starts calculating the critical path, the chain of tasks that directly determines your project's overall finish date.

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. 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 their 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 actually run status meetings off of.