Connect Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Project to a team project

To add or modify Team Foundation work items by using Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Project, you connect your worksheet or project plan to a team project. Establishing this connection binds the document to the selected Team Foundation Server (TFS), team project collection, and team project to exchange information. If you open Excel or Project from Team Explorer, the document is automatically bound to the team project.

If the team project is moved to a different team project collection in the same instance of TFS, your documents will automatically be reconnected. However, if the team project is moved to a different instance of TFS, you must manually reconnect your documents to the new server.

Required Permissions

To follow these procedures, you must be a member of the Readers group or have your View work items in this node permission set to Allow. See Team Foundation Server Permissions.

To connect Excel or Project to a Team Project

1. If you don't have Microsoft Excel 2007 or Microsoft Project 2007 or later, install what you need: see Excel 2010 or Project 2010.

2. If you haven't installed Visual Studio or Team Explorer, you'll need to install one of these versions to get the Team Foundation add-in to Excel.

3. Start with a blank worksheet or project plan. If you don't see the Team ribbon (or the Team menu if you use Excel 2007 or Project 2007), see step 2.

   

   Tip

   If the Team ribbon no longer appears, you might need to re-enable it.

4. Connect to TFS and the team project. If you can't connect, get added as a team member.

   

   If it is your first time connecting to TFS from Excel or Project, you might have to add TFS to the list of recognized servers.

   

5. Your worksheet or project plan is now bound to your team project. What this means is that you can add work items to the team project from the Office document or add work items to the Office document from the team project.

   To learn more, see Bulk add work items with Excel or Schedule tasks and assign resources using Project.

To reconnect a document to a different team project collection

1. Open the document that you want to reconnect to a different team project collection, and follow one of these steps:

   • In Excel, on the Team tab, in the Work Items group, choose Configure, Server Connection.

   • In Project, on the Team menu, choose Configure Server Connection.

   The Reconnect Document to Team Foundation Server Instance dialog box appears.

2. Choose OK only if the team project that contains the work items in the document has been moved to a different team project collection or a different server instance. Otherwise, choose Cancel.

   Tip

   Documents are bound to a specific team project and cannot be reconnected to other team projects.

3. In the Reconnect Document to Team Project Collection window, choose the name of the server that contains the team project to which which you want to reconnect the document. The team project collection must contain the work items that are defined in the worksheet or project plan.

   If that server does not appear in the list, perform the same steps you performed in step 4 for the previous procedure.

   The worksheet or project plan is now reconnected to a team project on the server that you specified.

4. Save the document to your local computer.

See Also

Tasks

Work Offline and Reconnect to Team Foundation Server

Concepts

Bulk add or modify work items with Excel

Create your schedule, backlog, and tasks using Microsoft Project

Use Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Project to connect to Team Foundation Server