Marking progress on a newly applied project plan can be frustrating. You may have a dozen books that are already consultant checked and some that have already been printed. Yet, when you or your administrator applies a new plan to your project, you find that you are unable to mark tasks as done for work that is already completed. The Stages Table provides a simple grid (below) that is supposed to make this easy, but as you will soon see, it doesn’t always work as expected.
With a single click, the administrator can check off all the tasks in a stage as being complete. Let’s suppose that Genesis has already been consultant checked and printed. We want to mark all six stages as having been completed. We start by marking Drafting as complete:
Now all the tasks in the drafting stage have been marked as complete for the book of Genesis. Next, we can mark Team Checking as complete (At the time of this writing there seems to be a bug. You may have to click outside of the Assignments and Progress window and then back inside the window before you can mark the next stage as complete). After we do this for the first three stages in our sample project, we are suddenly blocked. In the image below, Paratext says that we have over 4,000 issues to resolve in Genesis before we can mark the consultant check as being completed!
This is where the frustration begins. Genesis has already been checked and completed in Paratext 7 a while ago, and the team does not have the time to go back over everything. What can they do?!
Fortunately, there is a way to resolve this problem.
The Solution
The reason that Paratext won’t let you proceed is that the automatic checks have discovered problems that are supposed to be resolved before the stage can be marked complete. Often these are things like missing Biblical term renderings or unknown spelling status for words. You may, in fact, want to revisit these before your final publication, but not now! You just want Paratext to show the correct status for the book of Genesis, and any others that have been completed. The project administrator can bypass these error messages and correctly mark the completed stages in three simple steps:
- 1. Temporarily turn off automated checks using the Bulk Progress Mode
- 2. Use the Stages Table to mark the completed stages for existing books
- 3. Turn the automated checks back on (this happens automatically when you close the Assignments and Progress window)
Temporarily turn off automated checks
- Click on the blue Assignments & Progress icon in the upper right-hand corner of your project
- Click on the Main Project menu
- Click on Bulk Progress mode
This will put the Assignments & Progress window into Bulk progress mode. You can confirm this by the green notification banner that will appear across the top of the window. If you look at the four red arrows on the screen capture below, you will see that the four automated checks for the stage shown have been disabled. (Note: We are showing the All tasks view, but if you were using on of the other views before starting this process then the Assignments & Progress window will still be in that view.)
Use the Stages Table to mark the completed stages for existing books
Next you will need to change the Progress & Assignments window to the Stages view (assuming that you were not already in the stages view). To change the view click on the the drop down arrow next to All Tasks, then click on Stages Table from the dropdown menu.
You will now be able to use the Stages table to mark the actual stage of completed books. (You will not receive any messages about errors in the text that need to be resolved as before.)
Turn the automated checks back on
When you close the Assignments & Progress window the automated checks will be re-enabled for the stages just as they were before you had used bulk progress mode.