Project2Excel

What it is for

A Microsoft Project schedule is usually read by far more people than ever author one. The planner has Project; the engineers, the commercial team, the client and the subcontractors mostly do not, and buying each of them a licence to look at a Gantt chart is not a serious proposal. What those readers actually want is the schedule in the tool they already use all day.

Project2Excel opens an .mpp file and writes a real Excel workbook — not a screenshot of a chart, and not a flat CSV dump that loses the hierarchy. The result is something a reader can filter, sort, comment on and paste into a report, on a machine that has never had Project installed.

What it produces

One workbook, with the schedule split across the sheets you would otherwise build by hand:

• Gantt View — task hierarchy, durations, dates, progress and resources, with calendar-aware shading for nonworking days, milestone markers, critical-task highlighting, and thin FS/SS/FF/SF dependency connectors drawn behind the bars.
• Task Data — the filterable source data, with real task IDs, readable dependency notation, and baseline, actual, constraint and calendar fields.
• Resources — the project’s resource catalog, with rate, calendar and contact fields.
• Assignments — task-to-resource assignments with resolved names, units, work and cost.
• Relations — one row per relationship, with endpoint IDs and names, type, lag and lag units.

The Gantt is drawn with Excel’s own primitives rather than pasted as a picture, so it stays legible when someone widens a column or changes the timescale.

How it reads the file

The .mpp format is not documented for outside use, so the conversion is done by MPXJ, a mature open-source Java library that reads Project files directly. That means a Java runtime is involved — but a trimmed one ships inside the application, along with the reader itself. There is no system-wide Java to install, no JAVA_HOME to set, and no version conflict with anything else on the machine.

Two ways to run it

A desktop application for Windows and macOS covers the ordinary case: pick a file, choose a timescale, write the workbook. A command-line interface covers the rest — batch conversion, scheduled jobs, or a pipeline step — with switches for output path, timescale and overwrite behaviour.

Installing it

The Windows installer defaults to a per-user install that needs no administrator rights, which matters on a locked-down corporate machine; an administrator can still choose an all-users install, and both modes can be driven unattended. On macOS the app is dragged out of its disk image in the usual way. The macOS build is checked at package time to confirm nothing in it links outside the bundle or the system frameworks.

What it does not do