Impact of the 'Include Weekends' Setting when Importing a Microsoft Project Plan

Uploading from Microsoft Project 

Streamlining your project management process involves seamlessly uploading Microsoft Project plan files to Fluid. In this article, we explain how the inclusion or exclusion of weekends in your project schedule can influence effort estimations and adjust start and end dates post-upload from MSP. You can read more about setting project schedules to include or exclude weekends here.

As in different tools, there are different functions and capabilities, not all functions of the other tools will be supported in Fluid, so there are some key factors to remember. When uploading a MSP file to Fluid you are now uploading your plan to adopt Fluid's behaviour's so you have consistency in all reporting. 

Key factors to remember: 

Fluid will always look at Start Date + Effort  when uploading an MSP file, this means your end date may differ from that in your MSP file. A key factor that will drive this difference is if you have public holidays loaded into MSP, Fluid does not support public holidays in the project schedule. Another key factor that may change your end date and effort post-upload to Fluid, is if you have weekends factored into your MSP file, and 'include weekends' turned off in your project schedule, this is detailed further below. 

Include Weekends

• Include Weekends will keep weekends as working days in your project schedule, no dates or effort will be refactored or shifted after upload or replan - unless due to public holidays, which Fluid does not support and will calculate as a working day. 

Exclude Weekends

• If you have include weekends turned off in your Fluid project schedule, you will note that when you upload your MSP file (and you have weekend dates in this file):
  • Any schedule items with start dates and  in weekends will be pushed to the next working day, effort will be refactored to exclude weekend dates from being counted as valid working days.
  • Any schedule items with end dates in weekends will be pushed to the previous Friday (if effort allows) or will continue into the next week. 

For more information on Project Include/Exclude weekend toggle, click here.