Planning and collaboration are key to project success and for quick coordination, the Project files can be converted to PDF, HTML, or XLSX formats. During the planning phase, we identify the required resources, effort estimations, the project delivery timelines, the task dependencies, make reports, and more. Albeit a variety of applications providing capabilities to create project plans/schedules but MS Project is one of the leading project plan development applications. But, in order to view the project plan, one needs to have MS Project or any other supported application installed on their system. These applications have a licensing cost attached and sometimes in order to just view the document, one has to perform the complete installation process which consumes a lot of time.
Therefore, in order to curb all these unnecessary costs (time and money), we recommend using Aspose.Tasks Cloud which is based on REST APIs it provides the capabilities to render MPP files to various supported formats as specified below.
MPP to XLSX conversion
MS Excel is among the widely used formats for office data sharing and therefore, Aspose.Tasks Cloud is empowered with the capabilities to render MS Project files to MS Excel format (XLSX). The API provides the capability to perform the conversion over console/terminal on any platform. Even though our APIs can be evaluated for free, but in order to ensure data integrity, they are only accessible to authorized personnel. Furthermore, in order to access the API on command prompt, you need to generate a JWT token based on your specific username and password.
The quick way to install Aspose.Tasks Cloud SDK for .NET is through NuGet package via a command in the package manager console:
Install-Package Aspose.Tasks-Cloud -Version 21.2.0
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cURL command
curl -X GET "https://api.aspose.cloud/v3.0/tasks/Home%20move%20plan.mpp/format?format=xlsx&returnAsZipArchive=false" \
-H "accept: multipart/form-data" \
-H "authorization: Bearer <JWT Token>" \
-o myresultant.xlsx
The resultant myresultant.xlsx is saved in the current directory.
C# .NET
The following steps define the procedure to convert the MS Project file (MPP) file to XLSX.
- First of all, we need to initialize an object of TasksApi while passing ClientID and ClientSecret details.
- Secondly, create an object of GetTaskDocumentWithFormatRequest and specify the input project file and desired output format from ProjectFileFormat enumeration
- Then call GetTaskDocumentWithFormat(..) method of TasksApi class and pass the object created in the above line as an argument
- The resultant file is returned as a Stream instance
How to Convert MPP to PDF
The conversion of the MS Project file to PDF format is similar as specified above for XLSX conversion and the only difference is the provision of PDF value from ProjectFileFormat enumeration as output format.
cURL command
curl -X GET "https://api.aspose.cloud/v3.0/tasks/Home%20move%20plan.mpp/format?format=pdf&returnAsZipArchive=false" \
-H "accept: multipart/form-data" \
-H "authorization: Bearer <JWT Token>" \
-o Converted.pdf
C#.NET
In order to convert the MS Project file to PDF format, the following value needs to be selected from the enumeration.
Image 1:- Selection of Pdf value from enumeration.
MPP conversion to HTML
When saving the MPP file to HTML format, we need to specify a boolean value for the returnAsZipArchive parameter. So when the parameter is specified as true, the HTML resources are included as separate files and returned with the resulting HTML file as a zip package.
cURL Command
curl -X GET "https://api.aspose.cloud/v3.0/tasks/Home%20move%20plan.mpp/format?format=html&returnAsZipArchive=true" \
-H "accept: multipart/form-data" \
-H "authorization: Bearer <JWT Token>" \
-o newoutput.html
Furthermore, when using conversion code in programming SDK, we need to provide Html as a value from ProjectFileFormat enumeration. Given below is the preview of the resultant HTML.
Image 2:- A preview of resultant HTML
You may consider downloading the sample files used in above examples from
- Home move plan.mpp
- myresultant.xlsx
- Converted.pdf
- newoutput.zip (MPP to HTML conversion)
Conclusion
Please note that Aspose.Tasks Cloud is a complete solution for MS Project files processing and in this article, we have learned how we can convert MPP files to XLSX, PDF for HTML format for easy collaboration. No software download or installation required and quickly start accomplishing your desired operations with a minimal set of lines. Specified below are some of the features supported by the API
- Add project assignments or delete project assignments along with their references
- Get the project’s outline codes by index & get links to all project tasks
- Import projects from Primavera DB formats or from databases with the specified connection string
- Manage project tasks, resource data, calendars & Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)
- Perform risk analysis using Monte Carlo simulation and create a report
- Create and set project document properties & fetch all or specific existing properties
- Read project’s extended attributes, time-scaled data, or recurring info of any specific task
- Reschedule project tasks, dates, and other settings
- Calculate slacks & recalculate project completion or incompletion work