Baseline feature

What it does

Schedule baselines let you freeze a snapshot of your plan and track how the live schedule drifts from it over time. Instead of relying on memory or side-by-side spreadsheets, you get the comparison built directly into the Gantt chart.

Key concepts

• Baseline: A named version of your schedule, captured at a specific point in time, that acts as your reference plan.

• Named version: A saved snapshot in your project's version history. You can create a named version from any change in the history. It doesn't have to be the very first plan. Any named version can later be set as a baseline.

• Variance: The difference, in days, between where a task was originally planned to start (in the baseline) and where it currently sits in the live schedule.

What you'll see once a baseline is set

• Baseline bars in the Gantt is a visual marker showing where each task was originally scheduled, displayed alongside the live schedule bars.
• Variance column shows the drift in days for each task, so you can spot slippage (or gains) at a glance.
• Details panel surfaces tasks that have been added or removed since the baseline was captured, so scope changes don't get lost in the noise of date shifts.

Setting a baseline from old version of the schedule

1. Open your schedule's version history.
2. Create a named version from the point in the history you want to use as your reference plan.
   To do this, open the version history, click the three dots next to the version you want to use, and select "Name this version".
   
   
   
   
3. Open the baseline panel and create a new baseline. Click the 3 dots next to the baseline and select the option "Point at a saved version"
   
   
4. Select the version you named in the version history.

Why use it

Baselines make it easy to answer questions like:

• Are we ahead or behind where we planned to be, and by how much?
• Which tasks have drifted the most?
• Has scope changed since we committed to this plan?