Speaker 1: If you're trying to allocate resources in air table, you have come to the right place because this video is going to be breaking down exactly how to use the new allocation features inside of the timeline view. So if that's of interest stick around and let's get into it. Welcome back. If you are new to this channel, my name is Gareth and I am the owner here at gap consulting, where we make it our mission to save you up to 20 hours or more every week with no code. Now, if that sounds too good to be true, it might be because you haven't yet learned how to leverage automation within no code. So before we get into the video, I want to invite you to join me for my webinar training. It's a totally free training that will teach you the fundamental building blocks of automation in air table and automation in no code. In general, we're going to go through how to build all of the automated processes that can run in the background so that you don't have to do those administrative repetitive tasks day in and day out. If that's of interest, check out that training at garethpronovost.com slash webinar dash registration. I'll include links below, but let's go ahead and now jump into the heart of the video where we are talking about how to allocate resources inside of air table. This is a really cool new feature that was just released for the timeline view. So hopping on into my screen, you'll see that I've started off with projects, team members, and time off. The most important table here is going to be our projects table. And this is where we are going to build the timeline view as it relates to the different resources, or in this case, our team members and how much availability they have to work on specific projects. So let's break down what I've got so far now in the time, off table, we have simply a link to our team members. So we've got dr. Strange here requesting some time off. This is the date that he requested off. And if it's approved, we're going to check it off. You'll notice that in black widow's case, she hasn't received approval for this four 11 time off request. And we could imagine that folks are entering this information in through a form where they're just submitting the day off, selecting themselves from the dropdown and then manager approval would then check off the box once the decision is finalized. So inside of the team members table, this is really simple. All I have here is the first and last name. I'm then using a full name field to concatenate or string together the first and last name. And you'll see, then I have a link to time off, which we just saw a moment ago, and then also a link to projects. So again, projects is the more complicated table. This is where all this stuff is going to work together. So on a particular project, I have a type of project. So right here, I've just selected some color types. I've also colored the records this way, and this just makes it a little more visually appealing. I have start dates and end dates for each project. This is obviously going to be really helpful on the timeline view. And then I have these four fields, allocation of resources, how many hours are required to complete a project? I also have a link to my resources. This is in my case, the team member or members who are working on a project. I then have my availability. This is also a number field at present. We might have to change that. And then I also have my unavailability. These are my days off. And in my case, I want to make sure that these are the days off that have been approved. So how can we bring in these things? Well, I don't want to rekey them every time. A lot of this information is going to live in other areas of my dataset. First and foremost, we have the allocation hours required. Now, this is specific per project. So given that it should live at the project level, I will just key in that number here. Let's say project one is a 40 hour time commitment. Project two is going to require 20 hours. Project three could be 25 hours. So again, just a simple number field at the project level that I can just key in here because it's unique for every project. Now my link to team here, I have a linked relationship that allows linking to multiple records. So I can go ahead and select the different team members who are going to be working on this project. Now, this first project is 40 hours. So I might need to bring in two different team members in order to get it over the line in time. Now, in the case of project two and project three, these are simpler. So maybe we just assign one of our team members, black widow to both of these different projects so far. So good. Now let's talk about availability. In this case I've got availability per the resources that are working on these projects. So ideally we would know how much availability a team member has. This data should live at the team member level. So I will build an availability here. I'll use a number field and we could just say how many hours everyone has per week. So let's make that notation here in the actual name of the field. I'll say hours of availability per week and dr. Strange maybe works for us full time as does Peter Parker, but maybe black widow is a part-time employee only giving us 20 hours per week. Now we can flip back to our projects and I can actually look up that availability, the availability having lived one layer deeper in the team members table. So I can build a lookup field, not a number field type, but a lookup where I'm going to look at the relationship that I've linked to the resources. I'm looking specifically at the availability per week, and I can bring that back. Now in my case, I actually have multiple resources linked to the same project. And so a lookup field is going to bring back a value for both of them. Dr. Strange and Peter Parker both give us 40 hours each. So it might be better for me to use a rollup field in this case, where I actually some this, if you're curious about that, we've done numerous videos on this in the past, but in short you would change the type to roll up again. You would look at that availability and here you would choose to some, those values. And now I would see that I have a total capacity of 80 hours per week between strange and Parker, but this isn't actually the direction I want to take this. And you'll see why in a moment, I actually want to keep this as a lookup field for our purposes. So I'm going to make that change back to the lookup field. Now let's take a look at that unavailability. These are the days off that have been approved by management. Now this information lives in our time off table, our time off table links to our team members and our team members, then links to our projects. So if I want to be able to bring in the requested time off days, I need to first bring them into my team members table and then bring it into my projects table. So let's do that. I will first look up the approved days off. So I will call this approved days off and I will use a lookup field again here. This is in my team members table. I will look at the link that I have to my time off table, and I'm looking at the date off, but I only want to do it under specific conditions. So I toggle on the conditions here and I say only in the case where approved is checked, do I want to bring in that day off because otherwise it's not approved and I don't want to bring it in here. So I go ahead and create that field and I see at a glance, Peter Parker has two approved days off. Black widow has no approved days off and Dr. Strange one all for the month of April. Let's go ahead and now bring that one layer deeper into our projects because now that it lives in our team members, we have a link to our team members so we can now look it up here. So I will change this unavailability field into a lookup field. I will look up the days off that have been approved. So again, I've already set up the condition that they are approved when I brought them into the team members table. So I don't need to worry about adding a condition here because I've already conditionally looked them up, go ahead and save that. And we can see all of the days off. And now since Dr. Strange has one day off and Peter Parker has two days off, we have a list of three approved days off here for this team. All right, now we have the elements that we need in order to get our allocation working. So let's go ahead and flip into a timeline view. I'm going to create a new timeline view here, just create it up. The first thing I need to do is establish my start date and my end date for my timeline. This is pretty straightforward. You should already have a start and end date for each element. Let's go ahead and click next. Now I'm asked how I want to group my records. One of my favorite new features in this new release is the fact that if I were to group by my resources, that is the people who've been assigned to the project. Well, in this case, I have Dr. Strange and Peter Parker, and because they are a unique group, you see that they have formed their own group by default. This is the old way, but now I have the option to go into split multiple values into individual groups. When I make this selection and click next, you see that Dr. Strange and Peter Parker each have their own individual grouping, even though they were both assigned to that project. This is a pretty cool new feature. And I really enjoy the availability of linking multiple resources to a project and then being able to break it out individually in our grouping. Now we can also choose how we want to customize this label. If you want to add more stuff to it, great. I'm just going to keep it with the name and that's more than sufficient for me. And I'll click done. Now, once we're all set here, one more thing that you'll very likely want to do, especially if you're trying to allocate resources during the work week is come up to the date settings and make sure that you trigger it on to only work days, if this applies to you. So in my case, I'm using a total number of hours for these different team members. And if I don't toggle on work days only, it will instead take their total number of available hours and divide it by seven days in the week, which is a bit of a pain. So I need to make sure that I toggle it off and say only work days. If you want to add in some holidays, you can do so here by following the instructions here. In my case, I'm just going to call this good enough for now. Now coming out here, we see that dr. Strange and Peter Parker are both on that project. One, I can actually zoom this back a little bit. Let's say I want to look at a two week and I can of course, scroll up and down the timeline pretty nicely here. Now what I really want to get to is that allocation of resources, the utilization percentage. This is really cool. So I'm going to come down to my summary here. Now, bear in mind, as I move across my screen, each of these represents one day. So my summary, I can actually look at my allocation of resources, my utilization percentage of hours available by day. It's really nice feature. I click here. And the first thing you'll notice is that I can't do it because of the way that I set up my resources. My resource link is a many relationship, meaning I can include many resources on one project. While this is really cool that I can break out those different resources and group them individually. It does not allow me to use the utilization function unless I am linking to single records there. So let's go back and make that change. Instead of saying we have two resources that we're putting on a project one, let's break it up. I'll say project one part one, and I'll duplicate this and say project one part two. So I've now broken this up and maybe the start and end dates change a little bit. This goes through the sixth. And this one is the seventh through the eighth, a resource on the first part of that might be dr. Strange only. And Peter Parker is going to pick up the second part. I can change the allocation of hours to 30 and let's say 10 here. The most important part to change though, is this link here. I must make it so that this link to our resources is to single records only, not multiple. Otherwise I can't get that utilization or allocation summary. Go ahead and save those changes. I'm going to flip back to my timeline view now, and I come down to the bottom again to my summary, and I can now add the utilization. Let's go ahead and take a look at this. And now you understand why I built those four fields that I went into painstaking detail on earlier, namely allocation resources, availability, and unavailability. So let's get to work on these. I have my function utilization function. My allocation here is how much time is required for this particular thing. In this case, I built hours required, my allocation field. And I must also say what the rate is. That is, is that total hours for the overall project? Is it hours required per day, per week, per month? I must make my proper selection here. In my case, it's total hours for a project. So I'll keep it at total. Now our resources is automatically linked here. This is a link to our team. In our case, if you had other linked relationships, you would have to select the right one here, but I'll keep it as it is now for availability. This is a lookup field that's going to show us the availability of the different resources that we've assigned. So for us, we built a lookup field called availability, but in our case, it's availability per week. So I have to come in here and say per week, make that rate change. So again, for us, we had the total allocation for the project and then our availability was a weekly number of hours. So make that rate match, whatever makes sense for your database. Now the last piece here is my unavailability lookup field, where I looked up the days off that were approved. So I can properly link up to that. And if we want to add color here, I would strongly recommend it. This is going to let us know when we go over. So we can set up a rule that says something like, Hey, if I'm over allocated on my resources, I need you to let me know. So if I'm over a hundred percent, I need a warning sign here. Or maybe I want to say if I'm under 20%, then that's a problem too. So I can add a different color warning for that. If I'm under 20%, make that less than 20. So now I've got a few different rules in place and you see that I'm actually getting some colors assigned here at the bottom. But what I don't want, at least in my case is utilization for the overall team. I want to see utilization per team member. So the last little change I'm going to need to make here is to actually say, I want to see this at the resource level, not at the summary bar at the bottom of the page. And now we see that we get this lovely little utilization here. That's either flashing orange or red, or is not flashing any color warning to me. If my utilization is off. So to make this a little easier to see, let's actually go back into that utilization and I'm going to turn off my second condition. I'm going to ditch my orange. And let's say we're just concerned right now about over committing our resources. So here we are. If we look at dr. Strange, we see that we have one, two, three days here for project part one, and our utilization is said to be 125%. What's going on there. Let's flip into our actual data and take a look. We can see that we have this project project one, part one, it is ranging from three days. So from the fourth to the sixth, and it's 30 hours total. So it stands to reason that we would expect it to be 10 hours of a commitment per day. And of course, dr. Strange has 40 hours available per week, which we know is eight hours per day. If he's working a five day schedule. So yes, dr. Strange has been committed for 10 hours when in fact, he only has eight, which is 25% more than he can give us or 125% of his availability. So if we go back to that timeline, that's what it's telling us. He is over allocated. He can't possibly get this done. So what we need to do is actually pull that project back and give it an extra day. And in doing so we are now saying, Hey, we're stretching that project over a bigger period of time. So instead of 30 hours for the project to be done in three days, now it's 30 hours spread over four days, and there's no longer a capacity or allocation issue here. Similarly here, I see that there's too much on black widow's plate on this day. So I can stretch that project out, stretched it out, still a problem so I can stretch it out again. And now she's under, but I see that on these particular days, she's over allocated. So I'll have to move that project until she's done with the first one. And now we've eliminated all of the over utilization inside of our timeline view. Very cool new feature. I welcome you to start experimenting with it yourself so that you can better allocate resources and grow your business. If you have any questions, please drop them below and let me know what you think about this new feature. Also, if you want to stay up to date with the latest in air table and other no-code tools, be sure to subscribe to this channel and I will see you in the next video. As always, I hope you found that to be extremely helpful. If you did, and you'd like to learn more swing by our website and see how we can help. We offer a free air table crash course that will help you level up in air table quickly. And we also have some paid services, including hourly consultations with our experts. We have some online courses and a group coaching program, and for advanced needs, we can build a bespoke solution for you from scratch. So swing on by, and I look forward to connecting with you soon.