Access/Project Interface

[r. howell]

I'm not familiar with Project. I work in Access, and have been developing my
company's database.

Now there are some folks who want to use some of the database's information
for Project, because it makes prettier reports (for project scheduling) than
Access can. And probably it will do more for them than that, so it's a good
tool for what they want to do.

From what I've been able to glean in this newsgroup, saving Project data
into Access on a regular basis seems to work better than saving Access data
into project. Is that accurate, or is it an artifact of being in a Project
newsgroup?

I have a number of reasons I would prefer to go the Access into Project
route: I have considerably more expertise in Access than the Project users
have in Project--I don't trust what kind of input forms they will come up
with, or what timetable they will be on; I would prefer to put in place
something that will give them the data and then let them worry about whether
they can get Project up and running the way they want to; I think I want to
capture some data from the schedule input people that Project people will
probably have no use for (e.g. does this person get copies of mail on this
project, and if so, what kind). However, I do not want to set something up
that is either impossible or drastically cumbersome to implement in terms of
the interface. My hope would be that we could find something which would let
a person get the data from Access--ideally, a proceedure which could
automatically be done at the end of a day or end of a week so that the two
systems stayed pretty much in sync with each other. Is this possible? Or do
I have to find a Project book and start studying?

Thanks for any advice you can give.

 

[Rick Williams]

You can write a routine in Access basis to do what you describe. Just add a
reference to MS Project in the VB Editor, and cycle through your database
records, and one each pass, cycle through your Project tasks. Make sure that
you use the UniqueID of the tasks and not just the ID. Also make sure you
use a Predecessors field (a memo field) in your database. You can update
your tasks from the Access code, have Project recalculate, then use the
CopyPicture function to make a nice GIF graphic.
Good luck,
Rick