Create a Microsoft Project Plan from Team Foundation Work Items
You can create an Office Project plan from Team Foundation work items by using Office Project or by using Team Explorer. Before you create your plan, you may want to define a work item query that will return the work items that you want to add in your plan. For more information, see Finding Bugs, Tasks, and Other Work Items.
In this topic
Creating a Project Plan Using Office Project
Creating an Office Project Plan Using Team Explorer
Note
An Office Project plan maintains some data about work item scheduling that is not maintained in Team Foundation. You should save the Office Project plan in order to preserve this scheduling information. For more information about how Office Project and Team Foundation manage scheduling information, see Quick Tips and Operational Differences when Tracking Tasks Using Microsoft Project and Team Foundation.
Required Permissions
To perform this procedure, you must be a member of the Contributors group or have your View work items in this node, and your Edit work items in this node permissions set to Allow. For more information, see Team Foundation Server Permissions.
Create a Project Plan Using Office Project
To create a project plan by using Office Project
In Office Project, on the Team menu, click Choose Team Project.
Note
If you do not see this option, you have not installed Team Explorer on this computer. You must install Team Explorer on this computer in order to connect to Team Foundation Server.
In the Connect to Team Project dialog box, in the Team Foundation Server list, click the name of the server that contains the team project that you want.
Note
If the drop-down list is empty, click the Servers button to manually enter the server connection settings. Contact your Team Foundation Server administrator or team project administrator to obtain the connection settings.
For more information, see Connect a Microsoft Office Document to Team Foundation Server.
Under Directory, click the name of the project collection that hosts the team project.
In the Team Projects list, click the team project for which you want to retrieve work items, and then click OK.
The Gantt chart is populated with columns that represent fields from the team project.
On the Team menu, click Get Work Items.
In the Get Work Items dialog box, choose how to find work items.
To run a saved query, click Saved query, and then click the name of the saved query.
To specify individual work items by their IDs, click IDs, and type a list of IDs. Separate IDs by commas or spaces.
To find work items that have the same string in the title, click Title contains, and type the string. Optionally, in the and type list, click the type of work item that you want to retrieve.
Click Find.
In the list of returned work items, select or clear the check box next to each work item to specify whether it should appear in the Office Project plan.
Click OK.
The work items that you selected and each linked work item in the hierarchical subtree of any item that you selected appear in the Office Project plan.
Note
If you import work items that are linked to work items that are defined in different team projects, only those work items that are defined for the team project that is in the top-tier of work items are imported into the Office Project plan.
(Optional) Modify work items, or add new ones.
(Optional) Link tasks and create subtasks using native Office Project tools.
For more information, see Sequence or Subordinate Tasks in Office Project.
Note
When you use Office Project to create parent and child tasks, the default behavior is to assign parent tasks the rollup of hours that are assigned to all its child tasks. Rollup hours are not published to Team Foundation so that the hours are not double-counted in certain reports. The Office Project mapping file attribute, IfSummaryRefreshOnly, suppresses the hours that are assigned to summary tasks. You can view the rollup of hours for summary tasks in Office Project but not Team Foundation. For more information, see The Microsoft Project Field Mapping File.
(Optional) Save the Office Project plan.
Warning
Office Project maintains scheduling data that Team Foundation does not. Therefore, if you make changes that can affect work item scheduling, you must save the plan to avoid losing those changes.
(Optional) To upload changes that you have made to work items, on the Team menu, click Publish Changes.
For more information about publishing, see Publish or Refresh Work Items in Office Project.
Create an Office Project Plan Using Team Explorer
To create an Office Project plan using Team Explorer
In Team Explorer, expand the Work Items node, and locate the saved query.
Perform one of these actions:
To add all work items found by the query:
Right-click the query, and click Open in Microsoft Project.
Office Project opens and shows the query results.
To add selected work items found by the query:
Right-click the query, and then click View Results.
In the query results list, select the work items that you want to open in a new plan. To select more than one work item, press and hold the CTRL key and click each work item that you want to include in the plan.
Right-click one of the selected work items, and click Open Selection in Microsoft Project.
Office Project opens and shows the work items and each linked work item in the hierarchical subtree of any item that you selected.
To open Office Project and then add work items:
Right-click the query, and then click Add Work Items with Microsoft Project.
Office Project opens. To add work items, go to step 5 of the previous procedure.
Note
If you import work items that contain links to work items that are defined in different team projects, only those work items that are defined for the team project that is in the top-tier of work items are imported into the Office client.
(Optional) Modify work items, or add new work items.
(Optional) Link tasks and create subtasks using native Office Project tools. For more information, see Sequence or Subordinate Tasks in Office Project.
(Optional) Save the Office Project plan.
Warning
Office Project maintains scheduling data that Team Foundation does not. Therefore, if you make changes that can affect work item scheduling, you must save the plan to avoid losing those changes.
(Optional) To upload changes that you have made to work items, on the Team menu, click Publish Changes. For more information about publishing, see Publish or Refresh Work Items in Office Project.
See Also
Tasks
Publish or Refresh Work Items in Office Project
Create, Open, and Modify Work Items Using Office Excel
Concepts
Finding Bugs, Tasks, and Other Work Items
Working in Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Project Connected to Team Foundation Server
Scheduling Tasks and Assigning Resources Using Microsoft Project