Importing MS Project files to Smartsheet

Roy Turner

When I import my MS project files into smartsheet it appears to lose information and change some of my start and finish dates. I have project but others in my company use smartsheet to view the schedules but the dates they are seeing are different. 

Anybody else have this problem and find a solution?

Mick Jordan

Hi Roy, I am quite a heavy user of Project and have imported large schedules into Smartsheet.  In theory if the schedule in project has been fully calculated and saved before importing then Smartsheet should faithfully recreate the dates as in the source plan.

The scheduling engine (if it can be called that) in Smartsheet is much less sophisticated that MS Projects and certain aspects simply don't exist (as far as I can see) eg Constraint Types, Constraint Dates, Task Types, Effort Driven etc.  This I guess, could result in the imported dates being modified by Smartsheet's more basic scheduling. 

What I would do is to save your Start and Finish dates within Project into spare fields such as Start 1 and Finish 1.  Then import the schedule into Smartsheet.  You can then compare any variances between what came from the MS Project schedule and how it has ended up in Smartsheet ie compare Start and Start1 and Finish and Finish1

Hope that helps.

Mick

Mehran Bagherian

Hello there,

My problem with importing from MS project to SmartSheet is the structure and the tasks. Some of the task are relocated in the schedule, and the structure changes as well. Can anyone help me with this subject?

 

Regards,

Mehran

Andrée Starå

Hi Mehran,

Can you describe your process in more detail and maybe share some screenshots? (Delete/replace any confidential/sensitive information before sharing) That would make it easier to help.

Hope that helps!

Have a fantastic weekend!

Best,

Andrée Starå

Workflow Consultant / CEO @ WORK BOLD

Diane314

hello, I have the same problem as Mehran, super annoying. I have converted my entire company to smartsheet but external collaborators send us MS project (for which we dropped the licences...) and now I have a few reported cases of waky imports. I can't even tweak the initial MS projects without licences.

Any ideas? Apart from typing it manually which will for sure make my users resent smartsheet for good...

Shelley Ray

I have the same problem as well with imports of MS Project putting tasks in wrong places, even making a subtask of another group of tasks as a parent task of another set of tasks. Date changes have also occurred. I've tried it on a fairly simple plan with these results. Please let us know when we might expect to see it tested and fixed as we'll need to hold off on using this feature until then as it won't be efficient to use until we know it will import the project plans correctly Thank you.

Chris Farley

I'm having the same issues. Moving tasks to become subtasks of another task. Date changing. As well as predecessors not being of a similar format, so they don't carry over. 80-90% imports just fine, however the remaining errors mean I have to confirm every line manually. This makes the import function unusable without several hours of editing. Any word on a resolution for this issue?

Linda Sirmans

I have the same problem where tasks are rearranged; tasks get moved to become parents of unrelated tasks, etc. I would love to know if this is going to be addressed by anyone at Smartsheet given this has been open for quite a while.

Sander K

Same issue for me. Need to import from MS Project, but it changes too much data. Please somebody fix it.

jamieG

Not sure if this is helpful, but I have had the similar issues when importing MPP. I just discovered that if sub-tasks in the MPP file are collapsed then Smartsheet ignores them on import. This creates havoc with predecessors which in turn affects dates.

You need to ensure all rows are expanded prior to saving the MPP file.

Bridget Ley

I'm having the same issue when opening a client's MPP schedule in Smartsheet. The start and end dates are accurate in some task rows however they are inaccurate in many. Is this on the roadmap to be fixed?

Danny McGibney

I found an old post from 2017 that an export from MS Project as XML will work. This is only partially true, as it doesn't bring in ALL the columns. But it may be enough to support the needs of some on this thread.

Seeing if there is some setting that allows me to bring in more, either in Smartsheet or MS Project.

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/13581/importing-ms-project-plans-tasks-in-wrong-order

Danny McGibney

https://help.smartsheet.com/articles/504553-import-files-to-create-new-sheets

TIP: Microsoft Project has some features, such as constraints, that are not supported in Smartsheet, and may cause rows to be out of order when importing .mpp files. To resolve this, try saving the .mpp file as .xml and importing the new .xml copy. If the issue persists, reach out to our support team.

Caravan

I see several recommendations to convert ms project to .xml before importing to Smartsheet but Smartsheet doesn't allow upload of .xml. I have 2k line items in ms project and when import to SS, it messes up the line sequence. Anyone's help is truly appreciated.

OrdinaryBob

I just saved the MS Project file in MSP 2007, and the import worked perfectly. Thanks for the rabbit hole of saving as an .xml. Smartsheet won't import .xml.

OrdinaryBob

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/comment/373714#Comment_373714

Save the MSP file in 2007, then import. This worked for me.