What are some of your Excel ideas for MLO exports?

[Steve Kunkel]

I'm not a computer programmer, but I've done lots of cool things with Microsoft Excel, just by using its built-in abilities.  It's not too hard to setup a workbook such that a raw export can be dumped into one place, then formulas and graphs read that from another place in the same workbook.  

The problem with any application that exports to Excel, is that if you spend any time setting up custom graphs and whatnot, then as soon as you export the newest version of your data, you have to start over with your customizations.  The above mentioned solution merely lets you retain those customizations for any number of exports.  Remember of course, that this can only ever be a one-way affair--MLO-to-Excel.  Never a two-way sync.  

So anyway...   Any ideas on useful Excel things to make?  One thing I might do is a gantt chart that graphs due dates.  

[Stéph]

Beter than ideas, I'd be keen for people to share example templates. Maybe Andrey could package up any good ones with his MLO installation files? If there are any XML and XLS programmers out there, maybe there are some even better output formats possible.

Stéph

[Lake Norman B2B Homes Boats]

After using MLO a while improved approaches to organization are usually developed. It is not so very easy to re-org ones tasks within the system. It would be nice to export, clean up, and import. The appropriate settings for doing this would be nice. I experimented a bit. My exports were messy. Realizing that mapping must be required,  a simplified method would be nice. 

[Martin Bendig]

Perhaps using the data tab in Excel to import your exported data could be a part of your solution.

After exporting your MLO data open a new Excel file workbook, click on the "data" tab and choose to get external data from "other sources". Choose XML format and select your XML file. (I just hit "ok" in the next two dialogues)

Then your data should appear in the sheet as expected. You could build your dashboard, graphs etc. on a new sheet in this workbook (not directly in the exported file!).

Whenever you replace the previous XML export file contents by overwriting the old file with a new export (keep the location and filename exactly the same), you just need to click the "refresh" button in the data tab to refresh the data in your workbook. This semi-automatically replaces the data in the data sheet,but does not modify your other sheets.

Unfortunately I did not see a kind of unique task ID in the export, that could be very useful for further database operations. The "task name" column could contain unique identifiers, but in my case I modify the task names rather often.

[Charles7a]

Dependencies do not seem to be exported when you export as an Excel XML file. Dependencies are exported when exported as a MLO XML file. The problem is it is very difficult to parse the MLO XML file within Excel or otherwise to make reports.

-Charles

[Lake Norman Homes & Boats]

Thank you for your help.  

Sorry so delayed.

Did not see response.

I would have thought the program would have been designed to export, clean up, and import in a simplified manner. 

My tasks, projects, and folders are a ROYAL MESS

I was so hopeful that this would be my FOREVER app.

What is really strange too is that when I EXPORT it wants to locatee a fileto open rather than export the data into an Excel.

Have I messed up my settings??

Is it kosher to provide an email or phone number to chat directly?

[Michael Schollert]

I believe it all comes down to what one wants from the export/in Excel.

The XML of the TaskTree is relatively easy to decipher and analyse as the structure is quite clear.

Using VBA (Excel/MS Office programming language) you could import the MLO XML file and do stuff to the data.

Alternatively VBA could load the file to memory and traverse it there.

Again - one has to be quite specific on what one wants, like "I want all open tasks in Col 1, CloseDate (if any ) in Col 2 etc. etc.

If it is for cleaning up stuff (e.g. remove all completed tasks) and preparing the TaskTree for import again, that should be possible as well.

As I said - the MLO XML is well structured, so it is "just" a question of how much time one wants to put into the programming. :-)