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r/MSProject

▲ 1 r/MSProject

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I’m looking to train a group of PMs on MS Project. Would anyone be willing to share some old schedules I can use as a resource ?

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u/Jstice84 — 2 days ago
▲ 11 r/MSProject+1 crossposts

I built a real project scheduling engine entirely in Excel — now I’m stress-testing it with 1,200 tasks

I started ProjectEngine because Excel is often the only tool everyone has access to, while proper scheduling software such as MS Project or Primavera P6 is not always available.

Most Excel Gantt charts are essentially visual tables, so I wanted to see whether Excel could support an actual scheduling engine instead.

ProjectEngine is now an open-source Excel/VBA application with:

  • dependency-driven scheduling;
  • FS, SS and FF relationships with lag;
  • Critical Path, Longest Path and float analytics;
  • baseline, actual and forecast tracking;
  • milestones, summaries and Level of Effort tasks;
  • non-destructive TEST and SCENARIO workflows;
  • an interactive Gantt with drag and resize;
  • dashboards and S-curves;
  • English and French interfaces.

It remains completely local and Excel-native. There is no installer, server or account.

The project has now reached 12 GitHub stars, and the latest release has been downloaded 36 times, which is much more interest than I expected for such a niche tool.

The current challenge is performance at scale.

My stress-test workbook contains roughly 1,200 tasks, 2,000 task-related Shapes and 1,180 dependency links. I have already moved most calculations into indexed in-memory structures and replaced around 3,100 dependency Shape segments with a single generated SVG layer.

The scheduling engine itself is now relatively fast. The remaining work is mostly about reducing the cost of projecting the result back into Excel without giving up the native interactive Gantt.

I am currently finishing that performance work before publishing the next release.

I would be interested in feedback from both project managers and developers:

  • Is the purpose of the project clear from the repository?
  • Would an Excel-native scheduling engine be useful in your environment?
  • What size of schedule would you realistically try with it?
  • What would prevent you from replacing a conventional Excel Gantt with something like this?

Project and source code:

https://github.com/TMailletFR/ProjectEngine

u/DeathMaillet — 3 days ago
▲ 3 r/MSProject

I built a Mac app that edits .mpp by patching bytes instead of converting. It's out. Here's the sample file, open it in real Project and tell me what broke.

I ran Microsoft's developer division for six years as a GM/VP, then three years at PwC leading the Microsoft practice. The whole time, the thing I heard constantly was some version of "I'm on a Mac and the client wants the .mpp back."

Every Mac scheduler that "supports" .mpp reads your file into its own model and writes a new one out. That's a conversion. Anything the model has no slot for — deadlines, task splits, subprojects, external links, task calendars, resource notes — is silently gone. Not corrupted. Just absent, and you find out on the call.

I built the other thing. It patches the specific bytes of the specific fields you changed and never touches the rest. Changing a percent complete moves 2 bytes.

I'd rather you test it than believe me. There's a sample .mpp on the site that the app wrote on a Mac — tasks, dependencies, resources, baselines, costs. Open it in real Project on Windows. If something's wrong, post a screenshot here and I'll fix it and reply with the test name.

What doesn't work, up front: password-protected files (Microsoft's encryption is undocumented, and that's the entire loss list), MPX, Project 98 through 2003, no Project Server, no SharePoint, no ODBC.

Free tier opens and edits any .mpp of any size with no row cap. 30 round-trip capabilities, each pinned to a named passing test.

Happy to answer anything about the file format. That part's more interesting than the app.

https://projectkiller.app

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u/Sad_Ad585 — 5 days ago
▲ 1 r/MSProject

Decimal numbers in duration when updating MS project schedule

I have an inquiry, how would I go about making sure the number of hours and says in the back stage view is equal to the number of hours and days in the change calendar option when assigning my working hours and days. Say for example, I work for 8 hours everyday from Monday to Friday but I work half day on Saturday making it 4 hours, how would I reconcile it with the work hours of the back stage view. Also when I have to finish a concrete pour beyond the normal working hours of 8 hours, and I have to work overtime if maybe 3 more hours on a particular day, how would I reconcile that in the back stage view, so that when I am updating my schedule, the duration doesn't produce decimal figures.

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u/billyokitoi — 11 days ago