How to Import Tasks from Microsoft Project into Project Insight

Short video illustrates how to import tasks from Microsoft Project into Project Insight. The video explains the additional import mapping options.

Transcript:

In this video, I'm going to show you how easy it is to import tasks from Microsoft Project. What you're seeing here is a task list that is blank; there are no tasks in the project. To start the process of importing, simply click the "Import Tasks" button. Then, you are taken to a page where you can choose between Excel or Project. In this case, I'm going to import from Project.

You need to find the XML file that you've saved from your Microsoft Project and select that for the file upload. On this screen, there are two choices: you can upload to update the entire project, which will add and update tasks, or if you want to just add new tasks, you can do that as well. In this case, I don't have any tasks in the project yet, so I'm going to upload the whole project.

Next, you will be taken to a page that tells you how many new tasks will be added and what your changes are. Then, you can choose your mapping options. There are three main tabs on this screen. The first one is whether you want to import and map the assignments from Microsoft Project into Project Insight users. You'll notice there's a list of users on the left; those are the Microsoft Project users. On the right are Project Insight users. In this case, Craig Young will become Lamar Coleman, the design team will become John Ros, and Eric Griffith becomes Nick Ericson. If any users have their names lined up, then it will be automatically selected for you.

The second option, which we don't recommend, is that you can import the rates from Microsoft Project. Normally, if you're using rates and rate management in Project Insight, you should just use the default. The final option here comes into play when you have more than one task assigned to a resource. If somebody is not mapped, you have the choice here to assign all unmapped work to the other assignees on the task. What that will do is take any other work that wasn't mapped to somebody and spread it across to other users, or you can choose to remove any work that is assigned to somebody. This will reduce the number of hours, or you can say that anything that is unmapped should go to this one user. The default is to assign all unmapped work to the other assignees.

The other two tabs are less frequently used. In this case, sometimes your Microsoft Project file has generic resources, and you can map those generic resources to resource types if you have the resource type add-on enabled in Project Insight. For example, a developer would go to "Developer," and so on and so forth. This is how you can map tasks that are assigned not to real people but just to resource types. In this case, I'm going to turn that off.

The other advanced options are very infrequently used, but sometimes you might want to keep the percent complete and any actual starts if you're in the middle of a project. Alternatively, you might only want to import micro tasks as new tasks without performing any updates or deletes. This checkbox can be checked from the first screen. As I mentioned, there are also project options; you can keep the schedule start date of your project or import the project workdays. Generally, you don't want to do that.

The final option at the bottom is that once you've chosen your default settings, you can actually save these settings for any time you are importing. If you always want to import these users and always want to avoid resource types, you can preserve your settings, and this will save those settings for the future. So in this case, I've already decided that I only want to bring in the team members. I don't want to include resource types and I don't want to import any other users or options, so I'll just hit the save button.

Now, all 85 tasks are being loaded into the project. You can see that the full Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) from your Microsoft Project file is now in Project Insight with the new start date of the tasks that I created today.