Speaker 1: Hey there, it's Pat from PJM Scheduling Services. Today, I wanted to show you how to compare two Microsoft Project Schedule files. Right now, I have my current update open and I want to compare it back to my previous schedule, which in this case is a preliminary baseline schedule. The reason for it is I want to see all the changes that have taken place between those two schedule files. Things like relationship changes, added activities, deleted activities. That would be the purpose for comparing the two. Microsoft Project has a built-in function that allows you to do that. Open up your current project, like the most recent project that you're wanting to compare from. We go to report and then compare projects. We browse for our previous project that we're wanting to compare back to. In this case, I'm going to do my preliminary baseline, which is my previous file. You can see up here that I have, this is my current file. I'm comparing back to my preliminary baseline. You can choose basically various layouts that you've done, that you've created previously, which take the columns and stuff that you have and compare those columns to the values in the previous schedule. But for this example, I'm just going to do entry and then for the resource table, I'm going to do none since I don't have any resources. I click okay. Then you'll notice that now this comparison is running between the two files which will take just a second. Now, here is my comparison report based on the values that I was using in those columns. You'll notice up here at the top, we have basically the current schedule. You'll notice all of these columns that'll say, unique ID from the current file, unique ID from the previous file. It shows whether or not there was a change made between those values. Task mode compares the same thing, duration. There's all these values and if I expand this over, you'll see even more items that it's comparing. Let's use this legend over here, which shows there's a few options. The plus sign, which is it's going to be shown in this column. If there's a change, it'll say a plus sign means that this was added to the current project. A minus means it was deleted from the previous project and a question mark means that the name was changed from the previous version. What I can do is I can use the little caret drop-down, uncheck blank because the blank ones, there was no change between the two. If I press okay, now you can see basically all of the items that have been added. There was a name change here for this header. This section of the schedule was added. These guys were added. Name changes between the two files. That's one way to see what's added and deleted and name changed between both files. Let's go ahead and unfilter for that. If I want to look at duration differences, you can see duration current, duration previous, duration difference. What I can do is use that caret drop-down. I'm going to uncheck blank and then zero because it's just a variance between the two days. If it's a zero-day variance, that means there's no change. Now, we can see this item here, prepare and submit. I can expand this a little bit. HMA saw, cut, and steel. That's currently two days. It was previously 10 days. That was an eight-day delta between the two of those. You can go down, you can see all of the duration changes between the two. One thing you'll notice at first glance is you don't see the predecessor and successor changes. A lot of times when I'm reviewing a schedule, I want to know what relationship changes were made. The way that we do that, we're going to close this comparison report. Close this comparison, my preliminary baseline, and I'm going to go back to my current schedule. What I want to do is I want to add columns for predecessor, and then I want to add a column for successor. Because when we select that layout, when we run the comparison, now because I've added those two columns, when we run the comparison, it knows Microsoft Project is going to look at the values in these to see if anything has changed. Let's go back. Now that I've added those predecessor and successor columns, let's go back to report, compare projects. I'm going to browse again for my preliminary baseline. Then I'm going to get rid of the resource table because I don't need that. Just the task table and I'll set it to entry. Then let's go ahead and run that comparison report. It's having a seizure, but it'll get there. Here we go. Seizure is over. We have our table again at the top showing the comparisons. Now you'll notice that we have predecessor current, predecessor previous, predecessor difference. Now I can get rid of blank and equal, and I can see all of the items that have different relationships. This was previously tied to 325, now it's 312, and we can scroll down. A lot of relationship changes have been changed. Yeah, that's how you would look at your relationships and what's changed. The other thing that's interesting about this setup that Microsoft Project has is down below, you have our November 2019 file, which is my current file. Then you have the preliminary file over here, so your previous file. As you're looking through the changes that have been made, you might want to see, well, let's look at that change in the context of the previous file. For instance, if I was looking at this prepare and submit item 25. If we go down here, let's just double-check here, make sure, trees and salvage logs. I can then go down here to item 25, and I can look at that activity in the context of the previous schedule. Yeah, that's how you compare files between Microsoft Project. If you have any questions or comments, leave a comment below, or if you have any ideas for things that you want to see in a future video, let me know, I'd love to hear. All right, thanks so much. Bye.