importing Microsoft Project file into P3

EC Harris has a guide somewhere on his site www.eh.com.au

Basically it doesn’t work very well, tbh

I have been through the same thing with my production guys writing their shutdown plans in MSP when the execution plan is in P3. The best way I found was to export the MSP plan to excel then construct .DBF import files semi-manually. This was a pain but ensured that I was in control of the data and that no funny conversions would happen.

Hi Cristina,
This is the link:
http://www.eh.com.au/Technical%20Papers/030804%20Converting%20to%20and%20from%20P3%20and%20SureTrak%20to%20MPX.pdf

When you are done you have to recheck the schedule in P3 and implement the necessary fix the conversion is not perfect!!

Good luck
JK

Thanks very much to both of you. I will have a look into it. (I tried exporting into Excel first and took it from there, lot of manipulation to be done, though...). I will try all options as I can foresee a lot of these conversions / imports coming my way in the near future.

Thanks again,
Cristina

Here’s one easy approach... if you have a copy of Project 98 available...

Open with MSP20XX and "save as" a Project98 format
Open with Project98 and save to MPX
Open the MPX with SureTrak
Save as SureTrak native or Concentric P3
Open with P3 (only if you saved as Concentric P3 -- duh)

But... here’s the catch... you will need to completetly "outdent" the entire Microsoft Project data so there are no summary tasks and you will need to set-up text fields in MSP that will transfer over to ST/P3 activity codes. This will enable you to mimic the outlining in MSP... but of course ST/P3 will use this info for activity codes/grouping in your layout. Hopefully you do not have more than 6 levels of summary/outline nesting in MSP because there are only 64 characters available in ST/P3 activity code dictionary and the MPX will parse the MSP text fields into 6 codes of 10 characters each (as I recall). Anyway, if you leave the summary tasks in-place, they will transfer as "topic" activities and it will be a royal PITA to deal with.

I use this method all the time for small schedules and it is a great time saver.

JF

Christina
When I used mpx-format, I found that some data was lost and the dates not the same after scheduling.
When I imported mpp into P5/P6 and then exported as P3-format everything was ok in P3.
Regards
Dieter