Plan Comparison
Upload two versions of the same schedule and see exactly what moved, and by how many days.
Earlier version
The plan you are comparing against
Drop this version here
CSV, Excel, XML or XER
The file is read to produce the result and is never stored.
Later version
The newer plan
Drop this version here
CSV, Excel, XML or XER
The file is read to produce the result and is never stored.
Both files are read in memory and neither is stored.
How it works
- 1Drop in the earlier version of the plan, then the later one. Both files are read in the browser session and neither is kept.
- 2Tasks are matched by task ID first. Where a file has no IDs, a task is matched by name — but only when that name appears exactly once in both files, so repeated names like "Testing" never pair up wrongly.
- 3The headline is the finish date: what it was, what it is now, and how many days it moved.
- 4Underneath, every changed task is listed by how far its finish moved, along with milestones that slipped and tasks added or removed.
Common questions
- Do the two files have to be the same format?
- No. You can compare a Primavera XER against an Excel export of the same plan, or last month’s CSV against this month’s MS Project XML. Everything is normalised after parsing.
- Why does a renamed task show as one removed and one added?
- Because without a task ID there is nothing linking the two names together. If your files carry task IDs, renaming is detected properly and shows as a name change. This is the single best argument for keeping stable IDs in a plan.
- What counts as the finish date?
- The latest finish of any task in the file. That is usually the final milestone, but if a stray task runs past it, it will be the one showing.
- It says tasks were matched by name. Should I worry?
- It means those tasks have no ID. The match is still safe — a name has to be unique in both files to be used — but tasks that were renamed or duplicated will not pair up. The count is shown so you know how much of the comparison rests on names.
- Can I compare more than two versions?
- Not here — this tool takes two files at a time. PlanView keeps every version of a plan and shows the trend across all of them, which is the better way to see a pattern of slipping.
Comparing two files by hand every month?
PlanView keeps the whole version history. Upload each new plan and it works out what changed since last time automatically, tracks milestone slip across every update and puts it straight into a report.
See PlanView