This is part 2 of the help articles about importing existing projects into ManagePlaces with the data import tool. It covers some more advanced features of the data import tool:
- Budget fields
- Automatically calculating date dependencies
- Custom Properties
If you want to check the basics of data importing, read part 1 of "Importing existing projects into ManagePlaces" here.
Note: For important information on Work Breakdown Structure column format, please read this short guide.
1. Budget fields
You can now include information on your budgets with each task. For example:
| WBS Number | Title | Start | End | Contractors Budget | Materials Budget |
WBS 1.1 | Make platform | 11/12/2016 | 12/12/2016 | 100 | 100 |
Note: You should not include currency characters in the currency fields, or delimeters for thousands. Values such as 750000 or 3500.50 will suffice.
2. Automatically calculating date dependencies
Hopefully by now you have tried doing a basic import so you have an understanding of how to layout your data. Let's look at a simple example:
| WBS number | Title | Start | End | Lag | Prerequisites | Duration |
WBS 1 | Build Treehouse | |||||
WBS 1.1 | Make platform | 11/12/2016 | 12/12/2016 | |||
WBS 1.2 | Build walls | 13/12/2016 | 17/12/2016 | 1.1 | ||
WBS 1.3 | Add roof | 18/12/2016 | 22/12/2016 | 1.2 | ||
WBS 1.4 | Add ropeladder | 23/12/2016 | 23/12/2016 | 1.1 |
Note: All dates are in the DD/MM/YYYY format.
We can see that the first task (1.1) will take us 2 days to complete, as it has a Start and End date defined. As mentioned in part 1, prerequisites allow you to define dependencies between tasks. For example - “Build walls” has the prerequisite of 1.1, which means it cannot be started until the “Make platform” task has been finished. All of the Start and End dates have been calculated by us, and entered in manually.
To automatically calculate these timings, all we need to do is to define the Start and End date of the "parent" (i.e. it has no prerequisites) - which in this example is task "Make platform" (1.1). So the second task (1.2) will start after the first task finishes, and will run for 5 days. The third task (1.3) will start after the second task finishes, and will also run for 5 days.
| WBS Number | Title | Start | End | Lag | Prerequisites | Duration |
WBS 1 | Build Treehouse | |||||
WBS 1.1 | Make platform | 11/12/2016 | 12/12/2016 | |||
WBS 1.2 | Build walls | WBS 1.1 | 5 | |||
WBS 1.3 | Add roof | WBS 1.2 | 5 | |||
WBS 1.4 | Add ropeladder | WBS 1.1 | 1 |
Note: Duration will default to 1 day if it is not set.
Here is the imported project Gantt chart, showing you all the calculated dates. Note also how the first task was moved to the 12th December automatically, as 11th wasn't part of the Monday-Friday working days which were set for this project:
If you wish to also add a lag/lead time to a task, you can enter the amount of days lag or lead in the relevant column. For a further explanation of lag and lead, see this help article here.
3. Custom Properties
To automatically add custom properties to your tasks or task groups, add them to the column called "Custom Properties". Each property needs to be separated by a semi-colon, e.g.
| WBS Number | Custom Properties |
WBS 1 | Floor; Date Finished |
WBS 1.1 |
This will add the properties to the tasks as defined. It will only add in custom properties that you have already defined in your settings, so make sure that every custom property you want to add to your tasks has already been created. Any custom properties that have not been previously created will be ignored.
When complete, your task group will look like the below:
