Importing to MS Project problems

GanttProject Desktop Support
#1

While I really like working with GanntProject, I appear to be coming up against some limit: things are getting slower and behaving a bit off. As the rest of the team I am working with have MS Project available, I am trying to move to Project for this instance.

The export functionality seems to work nicely, but a few things go seriously wrong. Costs are over the top, even after adjusting the resource rates, the cost is still over twice what it should be. Resources are shown as overloaded if they are working on two tasks with 25% each. All things that I know Project does without a problem, so I assume there was a hitch when importing the data.

Is there a known set of steps one needs to take when importing to MS Project? Other things besides adjusting the resource rates that need to be done?

Thanks, Christian

image001
image001.png1923×1004 81.6 KB

test.gan (5.0 KB)

#2

Please give us a reproducible scenario, e.g. a .gan file and the result shown in MS Project (yes, a screenshot).

#3

Dear Dmitry,

I have created a simple example that displays the behaviour I mean. In Project Gantt the cost come up as expected and the resources are not overloaded. In Project the costs are completely off and
the resources are overloaded. I have in the past experimented and taken the resource loading down to 10% in several tasks, leading to less than 50% total load and still get this error.

This is the previous release of Gantt Project (I only just realized there was an update a few days back), and Project v16.

Thanks – I really suspect there is something basic I am overlooking.

image001
image001.png1923×1004 81.6 KB

test.gan (5.02 KB)

#4

Apologies, I had bungled up the editing on Friday and removed the screen shot from the correct post, adding it to the initial one instead. Which of course doesn’t help. I will blame it on “quarantine brain”.

Thank you again for offering to have a look at this - it is very much appreciated.

#6

So, I have played with this test project and the result of export and import into MS Project.
One serious issue with costs which I see: we export resource rate assuming that it is daily rate (because the minimal task duration in GP is a day) while MS Project thinks that it is hourly rate and there are 8 business hours per day. Thus, the cost of each resource ix 8x higher.

This was due to my misunderstanding the documentation of MS XML format. I thought that StandardRateFormat field (which is a number which corresponds to some time unit) defines the rate granularity (hourly/daily/etc) but it turned out that it is really just a display format, while the rate is always hourly (well, at least as to the best of my understanding at the moment).

This will be fixed in the next maintenance update or in GP 3.0, whatever happens earlier.

#7

Thanks Dmitry - that sounds easy enough to work around - simply divide the resource rates by eight.

Any idea what is causing the “resource overloaded” indications? This strikes me as really odd and is less easy to work around.

Thanks again - your help and support is much appreciated.