Hello again and welcome back to our course on Project 2016 Advanced.
In the preceding section we looked at importing data into Project and in this section we’re
going to do the opposite.
We’re going to export data from Project.
I’m primarily concerned here with exporting data so that it can be used as data in another
application.
But I will briefly touch on a couple of cases where we are exporting data in a form where
it can’t be manipulated, such as in the form of an image.
Let’s start with what is probably the most utilitarian of all the ways and that is copy
and paste.
Now the extent to which copy and paste is effective depends on what you are pasting
the data into.
Let’s start with Microsoft Word and what I’m going to do is to copy a part of a plan
into a Word document.
So I’m using version 17 of the website project.
I’ve made a selection within the table there and I’m just going to copy that to the clipboard
using the Copy command on the ribbon.
Now I’m going to switch back into Word and do a Paste.
And you can see the pasted detail from the plan.
Now in doing this what Word has done is to do a reasonably good job of representing not
only the style of this part of the table but also things like the indentation of the text
to reflect the structure of the project, the formatting of the individual lines, bold text,
etcetera, and the alignment of the text within the columns Duration, Start, Finish, etcetera.
So because Word is pretty good at that sort of thing it makes a pretty good job of it.
Now let me do the same thing into Notepad.
So I’m starting a new Notepad document.
I’m going to do a Paste here as well.
Now when I paste into Notepad I still get the data but I’ve lost a lot of the structure.
I’ve lost things like the bolding of the text and of course I’ve lost the alignment
as well.
Now it may be that I’m using Notepad to create a text file in order to interchange
this data with another system.
Text files, CSV files, etcetera often use for interchange.
But it’s important to understand that when you do that you do lose a certain amount of
the information from the source and in particular you will almost always lose things like styling
information and every often alignment, etcetera.
However in this particular case the presence of the tab characters that you can’t currently
see does mean that it should be possible to successfully import this data into another
application.
So let me close Notepad for the moment and I’m going to undo the Paste into Word and
I’m going to do the Paste into Word differently.
So on this occasion I’m going up to the Paste button there and I’m going to preview
each of these three options.
First of all Keep source formatting.
That’s the equivalent of the paste that we did before where the formatting of the
pasted data is the same as in the source, in this case Microsoft Project.
The second one is Merge Formatting.
In this case what Project is doing is to use the style in the target document, the Word
document, and the table of data is being formatted using that.
And the third option is to Keep the text only.
That’s quite similar really to pasting into Notepad.
So just bear that final version in mind.
I’m now going to move down to Paste Special.
And with the Paste Special dialog not only do we have alternative ways of pasting this
data but we can also do a Paste Link.
And with a Paste Link this creates a shortcut to the source file and changes in the source
file will be reflected in the document.
So let’s suppose that I set up a paste link, unformatted text, click on OK.
There’s that data again in a pretty similar style to the style in Notepad.
And just look at that first couple of lines, Requirement, 65 days, April 11th.
Requirements Definition, 65 days, April 11th.
Let me now go back into Project and let me change that 65 days to say 75 days and now
let me switch back into Word and you’ll see it’s been updated in Word as well.
So I’ve actually set up a dynamic link from Project into Word and that can be very useful
as well if you want to make sure that the document say in Word is dynamically being
updated with the correct equivalent data from a project.
Now so far the examples of exporting data that we’ve covered have produced editable
data in the target application.
So having exported the data we can do more work on it in the target application.
But sometimes what you need is information which you can’t really export in an editable
form but which you do need to be able to export to use elsewhere.
One of the sort of classic examples of this is one where you want a section of a plan,
say a middle section of this plan where you want to include the Gantt Chart part as well.
Now of course there are very few software applications that can edit Gantt Charts like
this that have been produced by Project, other than Project itself, and even then when you
export it you’re not really editing the Gantt Chart.
The Gantt Chart is a representation of what’s in the table.
But you can produce a static graphic image which does represent the content of all or
part of a plan.
And I want to quickly cover that here.
Let me once again select that middle section of this plan and this time on the Copy button
in the Clipboard group I’m going to say Copy Picture.
Now I get a choice.
Do I want to copy it for the screen, for the printer or to a GIF image file?
Let’s suppose I’m going to save it in a GIF image file.
Let me browse to a location where I’m going to save that and give the file a name.
Now I choose do I want all of the rows on the screen or the selected rows?
I’m going to say the selected rows.
And do I want the timescale as shown on the screen or only over a particular range of
dates?
And the dates I’m offered there are from January the 18th to November the 14th.
Now in fact this particular print is going to start at the beginning of the Requirement
section which doesn’t begin until April so let me change that start date.
And I’m going to change it to be April 1st.
Click on OK.
My GIF file has been created.
Let me switch into Word and insert that GIF file into a Word document.
There it is in the course files folder and there is the representation of the project
over that period from the beginning of April to roughly the middle of November.
Now that is a regular GIF image inserted into a Word document so I can format it in all
sorts of ways, change the size, add effects, etcetera.
So that is a sort of export.
So we’ve covered the Copy and Paste style of options for exporting.
Let’s look now at the Save As options.
When it comes to saving an MPP file the options you have are first of all for Microsoft Project
format.
So that’s the current one and the previous one, including the template variance.
Then we have PDF and XPS, both of which produce what are in effect non-editable sets of data.
Now technically with both of those there are options for the being able to edit them but
they’re really intended to be non-editable read only versions of an extract of data from
a plan.
Then we have the Excel formats which you should be familiar with by now.
I’ll come back to Excel again in just a moment.
Then we have the options for Text, CSV and XML.
All three of these formats are primarily used for data interchange, although with all three
of them they are in some instances used for other purposes.
Let’s just demonstrate one of these.
Let’s demonstrate CSV.
Let’s suppose I’m going to exchange this project data with another system and the other
system requires the data for input to it to be in CSV format.
So I’m going to click on CSV format.
I’m going to use that default file name, SimonSezIT_NFF_Web_Site_17.csv, and click
on Save.
Now depending on your Trust Center settings you may or may not be allowed to save in this
file format.
If you aren’t you’ll need to change the Trust Center setting.
And if you are allowed you may or may not get a warning first.
Mine is set to allow me to save in CSV format but I always get this sort of warning.
So I’m going to click on Yes and now I’m using the Export Wizard.
Click on Next.
You know about maps.
I’m going to use a new map and I’m not going to save it later on either.
This is a bit of a one off exercise for me.
And I’m only going to export task information.
Note I can choose my text delimiter.
Although we usually refer to CSV as Comma Separated Values some systems required other
than commas and sometimes the choice of delimiter can be influenced by what’s in the data
itself.
That’s the default choice of delimiters, tab, space, and comma.
I’m going to stick with comma.
And now I set up a mapping.
I can really map any field in the task data for this project to any field in the CSV file.
So let me just choose one or two straightforward options.
What about name?
That’s usually a good one to start with.
And then what about Start Date, Start?
And then maybe we’ll have Finish as well.
Now onto Next.
I’m not going to save the map.
Click on Finish and that’s done.
Now let me open that CSV file in Notepad.
And there it is.
You can see my header row, Name, Start Date, Finish Date, and then I have Northern Farm
Foods Website, comma, then the Start Date, comma, then the Finish Date.
Note these double commas here.
These correspond to the empty rows in the MPP file.
I’d need to be a bit wary of that but basically you wouldn’t normally expect them to do
any harm on import because you’d hope that the import facility would be able to deal
with those.
But other than that the data looks absolutely fine.
So that is another export option.
I’m just going to do one more export now and this is a pretty straightforward Excel
example.
This time I’m going to File and instead of Save As I’m going to go to Export.
You have two main options in Export.
One is Create a PDF or XPS document.
The other one is Save Project as File.
And as you can see you’ve got those four project formats and you’ve also got XML
format and Microsoft Excel workbook format.
So let’s choose Excel workbook format, click on Save As.
I’m going to use the default name here, Web_Site_17.xlsx, click on Save.
That brings up the Export Wizard, all straightforward so far.
Selected data but I’m going to use one of the existing maps.
Now I did mention these maps briefly before and they are standard maps.
And for each of them it takes a cut of the data in your project and prepares it for use
in Excel.
And this is very often used as an alternative way of doing visual reporting.
Now all I’m going to do here is to say let’s have the earned value information from version
17 of the website project, click on Next.
As before I can have tasks, resources or assignments.
Let’s just stick with tasks for the moment, click on Next and there is the mapping.
And it’s basically a mapping if you look down the Microsoft Project fields on the left,
of earned value fields to Excel fields.
So if I just go with defaults.
I don’t want to save the map because it’s already there.
Click on Finish.
Now let’s take a look at that Excel workbook in Excel.
And there it is.
I’ve done an AutoFit on column width.
You can see that some of the numbers come out to be fairly horrendously long numbers
but you can see you’ve got BCWS, BCWP, etcetera and that could be used in Excel for further
analysis and reporting.
So that’s an export to Excel using one of the standard maps.
Now one thing that I haven’t covered on this course is import from and export to SharePoint.
SharePoint is really out of scope here.
But people that use Project are increasingly using SharePoint as well.
So it’s certainly an area to look at in terms of import and export.
But that’s it for the main options that we’re looking at here and that just leaves
us with an exercise which I’m going to set you in the next section.
I’ll see you then.