Sync Timesheet with Microsoft Project

Here's a nifty Microsoft Project add-in that synchronizes timesheet tasks. Watch the video below.

Microsoft Project Synchronization Add-in

All your Microsoft Project tasks will show up in your timesheet, and all your employee timesheet hours will go up to MSP, and show up in the Task Usage view.

All this happens with a single click of the MSP add-in.

If you're using Microsoft Project you can synchronize your tasks and actual work with Standard Time. Now there is a little plug-in or add-in that goes into MSP, goes into the ribbon and allows you to perform that synchronization.

This is not a requirement you can use Standard Time independently of MSP but this little plug-in would allow you to synchronize MPP files or project web access. Whatever MSP file you have open you can synchronize that with Standard Time. Let's take a look at how that would work.

There are multiple ways to synchronize tasks in actual work between Microsoft Project and Standard Time. In this video we're going to look at the Standard Time plug-in or add in that goes into Microsoft Project.

Before we get into that let's take a look at first of all I have a simple test project here with half dozen tasks. Resources assigned; I'm looking at the work and actual work columns because those are most important for synchronization. If I go to the view menu, click task usage you can see I'm also looking at the work and actual work columns. I've right clicked here to choose the actual work field in the details because that's where the hours are going to come into Microsoft Project from Standard Time.

Back to the Gantt chart. As soon as I perform the synchronization you're going to see all of these tasks over in Standard Time. Then we can type some hours into the timesheet and get them back into MSP. Let's click the project tab and over in the right hand side you'll see a new button that's added here for the plug-in. That allows you to synchronize with Standard Time. I'm going to click that; first thing it wants to do is which project we're going to synchronize with or integrate with. I'm going to choose to create a new project. This name (by default) comes up with the name of my Microsoft Project file. I'm not going to choose a client yet, just create the project.

Then click OK to synchronize. Now that the synchronization is done we're going to see all of these tasks over in Standard Time.

Let's switch over and see what happened.

We see a new project in Standard Time. List of our tasks, you see them all listed here with the links. Duration column is equivalent to the work column over in MSP and you have your actual work. So there's zero's in all of these tasks because we haven't typed anything into the timesheet. Let's go ahead and type some hours into the timesheet. I'm going to open up this project and I'm only going to see the tasks that are assigned to me. That's the resource assignment you have over in MSP. So let's type some hours into some of these tasks and we'll switch to another user and put some hours in for that user as well. So now I've got some time in for myself and Buzz. I can go back to MSP, click that button for the plug-in and that will perform the synchronization.

But I wanted to while I was here to show you that there are other ways to get time over into Microsoft Project and perform that synchronization. One way is to go to the view menu and choose refresh project tasks. This is not using the plug-in, this is native within Standard Time. So if I pick this you see this project here I can click refresh now and it would do the same thing. It would pull down the latest tasks, it would send the actual work over to Project. I'm not going to do it here I'm going to do it in Project so you can see that plug-in.

Back to Microsoft Project. We're looking at the project tab, click this button again now the synchronization is done. You can see the actual work column has some values filled in that came from Standard Time. If I go to the view menu click tasks usage you again see the actual work column with some values and then you see the values that came over from Standard Time in this task usage view. That is the time scale data that came over from Standard Time.

You've got a nice little synchronization of the tasks and the actual work back and forth. Using a plug-in right here in the project tab in MSP.



More Microsoft Project links: Integrate Standard Time with Microsoft Project, Microsoft Project Info

This article Sync Timesheet with Microsoft Project was first seen on http://www.stdtime.com