Copying projects in Project for the web
Published Jun 22 2020 10:28 AM 18.1K Views
Microsoft

We are pleased to share that we've added the ability to copy projects in Microsoft Project for the web.  We built this feature to address your feedback to allow you to reuse projects and repeat workflows. With Copy Project, you can now easily duplicate projects to get started even faster. 

Copy existing projects

It takes a lot of time to build the perfect project plan. This is especially true when a project includes a lot of tasks or are part of a repeated process.  Manually recreating projects can be tedious and takes time away from actually doing the work.  With copy project, you can now create a new project by duplicating an existing one.  From the project, you can click on the title of the project to open up the details pane. From there, you can select “Copy project” from under the “…” menu.

 

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Click on the title of the project to open the project’s details pane

 

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Click on the “…” from the project’s details pane to open up the drop-down

 

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Click on “Copy project”

 

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Your new project will be created with the same original project name with “- Copy” added to it so you can easily track the copied project. You can update the name of your newly copied project through the Project Details Pane.

 

The overall project structure and tasks get copied over.  Copying a project does not copy over task assignments or the connected O365 group. However, you can always re-assign the project to the same group (or a different one!).  Tasks are also reset to 0% complete, so you can start your new project with a clean slate.

 

Tips and Tricks 

Getting started with your new project: Don’t forget to rename your project in the project’s details pane! You can also share this newly copied project to a new or existing group, by clicking on “Group members” in the top right corner, so you and your team can quickly get working on the new project.

 

Moving your project dates: When you copy a project, the dates will copy over – and you may end up with a lot of “late” tasks! To quickly adjust the project to your new deadlines, you can update the Start Date of the project to push all of the tasks out. That way, you keep the relative dates, durations, and dependencies of all the tasks.

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Update the Project Start Date through the Project Details Pane to change the period of your project.

 

Templatizing your projects: You can deactivate a project and use it as a template, so that others can reuse the project but not make edits to it. You can deactivate a project through the Dynamics interface, which will make the project read-only.

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First, go to the Dynamics app via the O365 Waffle 

 

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Select the “Project” module, where you will see a list of your projects – select the project you’d like to deactivate.  

 

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Once you select your project that you want to deactivate, you can click the “Deactivate” button. 

 

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In the Project for the web interface, you will see that this project is not editable, but can be copied. You can now use this as a non-editable template!

 

Feedback

If you have any questions, comments, or feedback on the Copy Project experience, please let us know! We love hearing from you, so please continue to tell us how we can improve your Project experience by commenting directly on this post, through the “Feedback” button in the product, or UserVoice for Project for the web.  We read every submission and try to respond as needed -- be sure to provide an email address so we can reach out to you for further

24 Comments

Deactivating the project to create a template is a nice touch!

That's a very useful feature @jackieduong

Brass Contributor

hey @jackieduong is Copy Project available as a flow or workflow action?

Microsoft

@Donal McCarthy right now it is only available in the web UI

Brass Contributor

Thanks @jackieduong, I'm excited about that 'right now'! 

Microsoft

I do not get an option to COPY--what do I need to do?  I have reached the limit of tasks (500) and need to copy this Project worksheet and delete some phases form the original with out losing the original data.  Thanks in advance.

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Copper Contributor

Hello,

What steps are needed if you don't see the "Copy" option, I only have the delete project as an option.

Any help would be appreciated.

 

Thank you, Jim

Brass Contributor

For sure we don't have this option appearing.  The only thing you can do with a Project is delete it.   This is a problem that makes Project unusable.  We would NEVER want to start with blank projects every single time. 

Microsoft

I actually found that Project for Web needs to be opened from the Desktop version where you CAN save a copy.  So I have saved copies and deleted rows form the working Project Plan to be able to add milestones and deliverables.

 

MaryB4_0-1611331161191.pngMaryB4_1-1611331203121.png

 

Brass Contributor

So after closing computers/browsers and restarting, the option to Copy started to appear.   Perhaps something about newly created projects , maybe a bug that if its a new project the option doesn't appear at first? Don't have time to debug it but we're OK now and are copying projects easily. 

 

Copper Contributor

I was able to determine how to copy a project and rename it, but I can't figure out how to view, and add as a tab, the newly copied project in a Teams Channel. Any ideas?

Microsoft

GO to teams channle click the PLUS sign to add a tab

select the website icon add the specific Project link and name the tab. That is it.

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Brass Contributor

Anyone found a way to copy Projects between Environments?

Copper Contributor

So far this only seems to work for default environment. I really need the ability to move projects to another environment.

Brass Contributor

Great functionality. It's also great that you can copy projects in PowerAutomate or C# with the msdyn_CopyProjectV3 action.

Copper Contributor

Is there a way to copy a project between environments - just the 'project structure' or 'project structure and data'  ? 

 

NB: I am brand new to this area

 

 

Copper Contributor

Significant bugs with copying or importing a project:

 

Copying a project -- task assignments are wiped -- WHY?

 

Usecase:  I have a 300+ task project which is re-used periodically, with minor revisions.  I want to copy the project to a new instance, so that I can keep the original for record.  I loose all of the assignments.  That is a major amount of re-work (and fraught with error) to have to manually reassign the tasks.  What good reason could there be for trashing that data?

 

Importing a project from an .mpp file   Task assignments AND task durations are wiped -- WHY?

 

Attempting to work around the above _BUG_, I exported my project to an .xlsx.   All data is included.  Upon importing into MS Project (desktop app) all data is still there.  Export the project to .mpp.   All data is still there.   Import the .mpp to Project for web, assignments and durations are lost.  WHY would you throw away important data that is included in the .mpp, and without even asking?

Copper Contributor

Same problem, it's a IMPORTANT things to add to get the group and the assignments.

 

Put an option at the copy moment to keep the assignments or not if we need, but it's a real issue that cost a lot of time to the project users.  At least, let us copy and paste the name from one group to another one...

 

Monday.com or other programs are more friendly users and I need to keep them until project will be better.

Brass Contributor

is there a way to copy owners along with the plan? We are using the deactive project plan as a template but have to reassign 80% the same people to hundreds of rows every time we launch a new project.

Copper Contributor

Although this is a klugy workaround, it might save you a bit of time. If you are referring to the assignees (Assigned to field), assuming that every task has an assignee, the easiest way to do this is to go to grid view and select the column of assignees, then go to your new copy, select the first of Assigned to task, and paste.  It should populate all the assignments, but with 2 caveats:

1. Every field must have an assignee, or the ones that don't will be ignored, and the next assignee will be put in its place

2. If there are Summary tasks, the assignee field is not recognized as the same format and will error out without finishing assignments. In this case only the tasks of each Summary can be done at once.

 

Or Kluge 2:

You can align the columns of P4W fields in grid view to match the Project Desktop fields (or vice versa), then copy/paste the matching plan fields directly into Project Desktop's matching fields, including duration, etc. (potentially better outcome pasting first into Outlook or MS Word, etc. and then copying from there).

Caveat: Any Summary tasks will likely have to be outdented (or its sub-tasks indented, depending on your copy/paste).

Save the .mpp, then import the .mpp file into p4w from https://project.microsoft.com (if importing the project into the Default environment). 

 

Or Kluge 3:

Same as Kluge 2, except instead of selecting/copying the plan items from P4W directly, choose "Export to Excel" in the ellipses (...) menu options to save to file instead, then copy fields from Excel to matching fields in Project Desktop.

 

The good news is once you have the .mpp file looking the way you wanted, you can put it somewhere where everyone can use it as the project template to import for each new project after that.

 

Hope some of that helps.

Copper Contributor

Thanks for trying @Christopher Canham but those don't work.

 

Kludge 1, because of caveat #2 -- A project of any size will have summary tasks.  Mine has many summary, as well as sub-summary tasks (3 or more deep hierarchy.

Kludge 2 -- Asking that I out-dent all of my summary tasks to make the tasks line up.  Far too labor intensive, and fraught with error in restoring my summary tasks.

 

Kludge 3 --  Already addressed in my post of 1/12/23 -- Last paragraph.  Upon importing the .mpp the assignments are lost.

 

Hoping to try out the Project Template, just logged into O365 looking for Dynamics under Waffle -- nope, not there. Searched all of my apps -- no Dynamics.  Attempted to add Dynamics.  Not found.

 

@jackieduong"Copying a project does not copy over task assignments or the connected O365 group. However, you can always re-assign the project to the same group (or a different one!)."    Unacceptable!   When will this BUG that looses data when copying a project be fixed?  It has been a known issue since 6/2020 -- that is three and a half years!

 

 

Brass Contributor

It wont be long before our AI assistant can copy the people over for us since it's an easy 1:1 match for row names. I just feel awful asking our admin to do this work as it's mind-numbingly tedious and the definition of something that should be automatable.

Microsoft

Also in some cases, I have a primary and secondary assignment and there is no easy way to do that besides a manual process right now. I tried several workarounds but have not been able to get the assignments to port over.

Microsoft

@srinaldi make sure you have selected the correct environment where the group/team who would have access exists. Once those permissions are set you should be able to see it and add to your Teams tab.

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‎Jun 23 2020 10:10 AM
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