Jenny said:
Hi Everyone,
I am hoping that someone can help me. I am relatively new to project and am
trying to maximize its potential in my company. What I would like to do is
create timesheets which show the tasks for each resource. I could then send
these to my resources who would fill them in bi-weekly. Once I had this
information in the excel based timesheets, I would like to then export them
to Project so that it can update the actual work completed. Is this something
that is possible?
Thank you,
Jenny
Jenny,
Yes, that definitely is possible. You don't have to use Excel as an
intermediary but you can. One reason you might want to use Excel is if
the people filling out the timesheets do NOT have Project installed on
their PC. Another reason is that most people are very comfortable with
Excel whereas Project isn't quite as intuitive or user friendly.
There are various ways to create the necessary timesheets in Excel. One
is to manually copy and paste but that is very tedious and not very
efficient. Another is to use the "analyze timescale data in Excel"
utility found on the Analysis toolbar in Project. Run it from the
Resource Usage view.
Here's the advantage of NOT using Excel as an intermediary application.
Getting the timescaled data from the Excel spreadsheet(s) back into
Project is a little more.... interesting. Unfortunately there is no
built-in utility for importing timescaled data into Project. There are
basically three methods for getting the timesheet data into Project.
First of course is the manual entry approach (i.e. enter the spreadsheet
into the actual work elements of the Resource Usage view). If you don't
have large projects and don't have a ton of resources, this is a viable
approach. However, for larger projects and those with a significant
number of assigned resources, a better approach is to use either VBA or
SQL directly to Project's database.
However, if all you really want to do is to import the cumulative actual
work (i.e. not incremental timescale values), AND there is only one
resource assignment per task, then life is much simpler - you can use an
import map.
Hope this helps.
John
Project MVP
