I built a dependency-driven scheduling engine entirely in Excel/VBA

Описание и применение

Команда создала открытый движок ProjectEngine на VBA, который автоматически рассчитывает даты, критический путь и другие показатели, позволяя управлять проектами в Excel без ручного обновления графиков.

Задача

Teams needed credible project schedules but lacked access to Microsoft Project or Primavera P6; manual Excel Gantt charts required constant manual updates when tasks changed.

Результат

Teams can maintain accurate, dependency‑driven schedules entirely within Excel, eliminating manual updates and reducing errors.

Рабочий процесс

• 1. Define tasks, durations, and dependencies in Excel sheets.
• 2. Run ProjectEngine VBA modules to read data into memory arrays and dictionaries.
• 3. Detect cycles and calculate tasks in topological order.
• 4. Compute finish‑to‑start, start‑to‑start, finish‑to‑finish, lag, milestones, and summary tasks.
• 5. Generate baseline, actual, and forecast dates and calculate critical path, longest path, total and free float.
• 6. Incrementally recalculate only affected tasks when changes occur.
• 7. Write updated dates back to Excel in batches and rebuild Gantt shapes efficiently.
• 8. Visualize results with interactive Gantt bars, dashboards, and S‑curves.

Доказательства

ProjectEngine is an open‑source scheduling and project‑controls engine written entirely in Excel/VBA.

Источник

Everything runs locally inside Excel. There is no installer, server, external account or cloud dependency.

Источник