Hi Sean,

If you want to load data to different fields against an existing task within a project, the Data Loader will help you do this. In our experience, you need to select the adequate template and tell the system exactly where to find the information you want to update.

For example, let us say we want to update the information on the Due Date, Duration and Work fields of a series of tasks within a project. The easiest way we know is to use the 'Task (Task)’ Item Type.

If you click ‘Advanced...’ and download the ‘Fields list’, you’ll see all the fields you have available for searching/adding/updating as required:

You can hide all the fields you do not want to update and keep the ones relevant for the load you will be performing. As previously said, you need to tell the system exactly where to find the information you want to update. To do this, you can use the ExternalID field of the task (as it is unique for each task). I also like to use the task’s name. This means I keep both ExternalID and Name in my load file.

To tell the system you want it to search for the tasks that match that combination of ExternalID+Name to perform an update, you’ll want to edit the headers of the columns of both fields on your load file, and add a ‘PK:’ before their names:

You will then want to fill in the information of the ExternalID and Name of the tasks, as well as the data you want updated (Due Date, Duration and Work as per our example today).

Please bear in mind that this will manually update all the fields you add information for within your load file. This is specially important to consider when dealing with dates (as the system will always respect your manual input over its calculations, and you can end up with dates not updating automatically with predecessors, or similar behaviours).

I hope this helps!

-Elizabeth