Welcome to ProjectEngine — questions, feedback and real-world use cases

[TMailletFR]

Welcome to the ProjectEngine community.

ProjectEngine is an open-source, dependency-driven scheduling and project-controls engine built entirely in Microsoft Excel and VBA.

This discussion is the main entry point for:

• questions about getting started;
• feedback after testing the workbook;
• real-world planning use cases;
• workflow or terminology that feels unclear;
• integration ideas with Jira, Power Query or other data sources;
• anything that does not yet belong in a formal GitHub Issue.

If you have tried ProjectEngine, even briefly, the most useful things you can share are:

1. what type of project or industry you work in;
2. how you currently build or maintain schedules;
3. what was easy or difficult when opening ProjectEngine for the first time;
4. what would stop you from using it in a real workflow;
5. which missing capability would provide the most value.

For confirmed bugs, please use GitHub Issues so they can be tracked properly.

For feature ideas, you can either reply here or create a dedicated discussion in the Ideas category.

Latest release:
https://github.com/TMailletFR/ProjectEngine/releases/latest

Thank you for testing, questioning and challenging the project. The first external feedback has already directly shaped versions 1.0.1 and 1.1.0.

[andrerwolff]

I am working on testing out ProjectEngine(v1.2.0) for my use case. I am a Civil Engineer Project manager trying to avoid using MS Project. I am running into some issues that may or may not be user-error.

1. I can not get any results to populate in the Baseline Finish column on WBS which leaves the Project Baseline Finish cell at the top incorrect (1/0/1900)

2. Every time I run an update the first notification i get is: Error in RestoreWBSFormulaColumns: Out of memory

3. Unsure how/when/why to use the "Update Planning", "Update Gantt", "Update S-Curve" vs "Forced Planning Update", "Full Update", or "Reset Planning" buttons.
4. Some random "i dont know what i'm doing" things like forecast/actual/baseline not acting intuitively on S-Curve, and not being sure what is the best workflow to add/remove tasks (i was getting errors at one point, can't replicate them though, may be related to items 2/3?)

Overall really liking the intent of the project and hope to use it if I can sort out the above items. Happy to help provide more information/feedback as needed.

Andre

[andrerwolff]

Glad I can help troubleshoot for your international users. Happy to keep helping sort things out/testing, I am not in a rush. I was about to start doing this on my own as a side project but I got lucky and found you solved 90% of the problem already!

Excel version: Microsoft® Excel® for Microsoft 365 MSO (Version 2607 Build 16.0.20228.20188) 32-bit

• Looks like my company deploys 32-bit versions. Maybe that is part of the issue?

Not concerned about date format, I can easily change formatting of the columns (and have been without issue). Same with default currency in "Weight (%)". Having an option to set as $ vs Euro would be nice, but i can easily just set the formatting myself.

[TMailletFR]

Thanks for your answer. 32bit was one of the potential root causes but let's first fix the international language and hopefully you'll be able to use it.

Regarding the weight you can put whatever you want as long as it is the same unit so no problem putting $ or even no unit. You can put %. You can put numbers with decimals or not. Money. You name it. It should work.

And I'm glad you manage to find it. I created it litteraly because I couldn't find one 😊

[TMailletFR]

There you go! A special dedicace to you in the 1.2.5 release just for you :) Thank you for you help and hopefully it can allow you to start using it despite beeing in 32 bits :s

[andrerwolff]

Seems to work well, no errors and Baseline Finish calculations are showing up.
I will keep testing it and let you know if anything else comes up.
Thanks for the shout-out on the release page!

[TMailletFR]

Oooh such a great news ! I'm so glad I managed to fix it.

And the shoutout was definitely deserved ! Thanks to you I discovered that all the native English speakers may have never went further that the opening.

I kept your recommandations in minds for later versions as I really needed so release this fix of several game breaking bugs.

If you find any more bugs or any other major missing please feel free to come back and let me know 😊