How to check activities that have been deleted or renamed

If you wanted to check activities that have been deleted or renamed from one version of a project schedule to another, including activities with the same ID, then you can use the Toolkit’s built-in schedule comparison function. This area can be accessed from under the Reports and Analysis menu, followed by the Compare Projects option. The Toolkit can make comparisons between multiple versions of a project schedule. In this example, we will compare a live project with a corresponding baseline schedule.

Let’s start comparing by clicking the Select Projects button at the top of the page. Select the projects you would like to analyse, and then click on the OK button at the bottom of the form. The Toolkit will run several hundred comparison checks and categorise the results into the headings on the left-hand side of the screen. From this category window, you should select the Task option. The system will refresh, and the second window will display a list of all check types that have identified changes between the project versions.

Let’s first look at the missing activities, which is automatically selected as the first item in the list. From the View Detail window, we can see all activities that have been identified as appearing in one version of the project, but not another. To see the detail of each point, you should click on the plus icon to expand the field. You will notice the ID numbers to the left of the activity status. These numbers represent the order in which the projects appear in the comparison list above. So, in this example, we can see the activity CSL4-AMP-5000 exists in the first and second projects, but not in the third project.

To check whether an activity ID has been used for tasks with a different work scope, we can select the Activity Description option from the Changes Identified window. The system will refresh and, from the View Detail window, we can click to expand all results in one go. From here, we can see the differences in activity descriptions between each of the projects. As with all Toolkit functions, we can export a report of all comparison check results. From the top right of the screen, click on the export button to initiate the download. The Toolkit will extract the requested data and collate it into a downloadable report. The report is produced in a standard Microsoft Excel workbook and contains the full comparison on each project selected.