When to use Microsoft Lists vs Microsoft Project

Published on 13 February 2024 at 10:34

In my experience, from a PMP point of view I see MS Lists as a tool to track your portfolio at a high level.  And I use MS Project or Jira on a daily basis using its features to the fullest with all the granularity and also as a container in which we are adding all the details, notes and progress as much as possible.

I like to use these tools in a collaborative manner, so I think about a clock on the wall, in which MS Project takes care of the minutes and second needles (all the tasks from top to bottom) and MS Lists controls the hour needle: projects in the portfolio and some important milestones. This is just a recipe, and it doesn't mean you have to use it this way. it depends on the complexity of your portfolio / projects. In my case historically my teams have used MS Projects or Jira so by exporting into an excel file the main data and importing it then into MS List it provides me with the flexibility of using more Apps from the Office 365 family: SharePoint, Power BI, Automation, etc.

Importing Excel files into MS Lists is not difficult at all, MS Lists will offer to import all of your columns as a text format, but importing an Excel file into MS Project Web is more complicated: You will have to import first the MS Excel file into MS Project desktop version, work with the mapping of each column to make it match the standard MS Project columns or chose a standard text, date, number, etc. type of column for that mapping.  Once you finish with the mapping and the importing into MS Project desktop version, the final process of importing into MS Project Web is not done yet, you will have to export again from MS Project desktop version into an .mpp file and then you will be able to import the .mpp file into MS Project web O365 as MS Project web only accepts mpp files to be imported. Keep in mind that importing the .mpp file into the web version may imply more adjustments in the web mapping.     

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