How do I import projects from MS Project?
Birdview allows projects to be imported from another popular project management tool, MS Project. The process is not fully automatic due to major differences in the two applications’ design. Project import, however, can help you save considerable time.
Supported MS Project versions: MS Project 2019, 2016, 2013 or earlier.
For Office 365 versions: export to an XML file and import that file rather than doing an export to 2013/2007.
Supported extensions: *.MPP, *.XML.
Minimum requirements
To be able to import projects from MS Project, you must have these permissions at the very least:
- Add projects
- Manage customers
Importing a project from MS Project
To import a project from MS Project:
- Open Activity Center.
- Click More actions (
).
- Select Import from MS Project.
- Retrieve the path to the project to be imported by using "Browse", navigating to the project, and clicking "Open".
- Click "Process".
- Match each user in the source project with one of the available users in Birdview, so that the latter takes place of the former with their default roles or ones of your choice in the resulting project.
Birdview will try to match the existing users with the ones being imported as best as it can (automapping). However, you can always override the suggested mapping.
- When you are finished, click "Import".
- Successful import results in the new project's details section opened, where it can be updated as much as it needs it.
For each task in the source MS project, there will be created a respective activity in Birdview, preserving hierarchy, if any.
MS Project tasks vs. Birdview activities
The way Birdview fields in a resulting activity are matched with ones in the source MS Project one is as follows:
| MS Project field | Birdview field | Notes |
| Task name | Title | |
| Notes | Description | |
| Start | Start date | |
| *) | Duration | *) Duration in Birdview is calculated based on Start and Finish, not imported from MS Project's Duration field. |
| Finish | End date | |
| Work (if Estimated is selected) | Estimated hours | The Estimated checkbox must be selected for the work value to be imported. |
| Percent complete | Progress | Completion rate. |
| MS Project user | Birdview user |
If the source project has task dependencies of a supported type – Start-to-Start, Start-to-Finish or Finish-to-Start – the resulting project will have them, too. The value in the Delay field in MS Project will be copied to the Lag field in Birdview.
Task assignees in the source project will be converted to activity assignees in Birdview according to the user conversion map defined before the import.
Only the fields listed in the above table will be imported. Custom fields or other info will not be carried over.