JohnAllen.us

One project that I’m currently working on calls for taking tasks out of a MS Project document and moving them to a Powerpoint presentation with pretty formatting. Maybe I’ll blog about the whole thing later.  Here’s a quick program I wrote to dump out all the tasks from a test project in a somewhat formatted output to verify I could actually get the tasks:

#!C:\ruby\bin\ruby.exe

require 'exo/iswindows'

if !RUBY_PLATFORM.isWindows?
   puts "This program only runs under Windows!"
   exit
 end

require 'win32ole'

def fmtMSProjDate(msdate)
   yr = msdate[/^(\d\d\d\d)\/\d\d/, 1]
   mth = msdate[/^\d\d\d\d\/(\d\d)\/\d\d/, 1]
   day = msdate[/^\d\d\d\d\/\d\d\/(\d\d) /, 1]
   return "#{mth}/#{day}/#{yr}"
end

def getAbsolutePathName(file)
   fso = WIN32OLE.new('Scripting.FileSystemObject')               ## VBA File System commands
   return fso.GetAbsolutePathName(file)
end

if !ARGV[0][/\:/]
  file = "#{Dir.pwd}/#{ARGV[0]}"
else
  file = ARGV[0]
end

app = WIN32OLE.new('MSProject.Application')
app.FileOpen(getAbsolutePathName(file))
pj = app.ActiveProject
#app.Visible = true

puts "\nProject: #{pj.Title.ljust(60)}" + fmtMSProjDate(pj.Start.to_s) + "  " + fmtMSProjDate(pj.Finish.to_s) + "\n\n"

pj.Tasks.each do |t|
   puts t.ID.to_s.rjust(5) + " " + "| "*t.OutlineLevel + t.Name.ljust(63-(t.OutlineLevel*2)) + fmtMSProjDate(t.Start.to_s) + "  " + fmtMSProjDate(t.Finish.to_s)
end

app.Quit

Here’s my test run:

C:\Server17\Dev\Ruby>ruby listmsproject.rb invasionofpluto.mpp

Project: invasionofpluto.mpp                                         01/08/2010  10/16/2026

    1 | Invasion of Pluto                                            01/08/2010  10/16/2026
    2 | | Get Ready                                                  01/08/2010  09/25/2023
    3 | | | Design Invasion ships                                    01/08/2010  03/08/2012
    4 | | | Build Invasion Ships                                     03/09/2012  09/25/2023
    5 | | | Train the Troops                                         08/01/2011  12/01/2022
    6 | | Travel to Pluto                                            09/26/2023  08/26/2026
    7 | | Attack!                                                    08/27/2026  10/15/2026
    8 | | | Look things over                                         08/27/2026  09/03/2026
    9 | | | Plan the invasion                                        09/11/2026  09/11/2026
   10 | | | Invade                                                   10/15/2026  10/15/2026
   11 | | Stand around and admire our new conquest                   10/16/2026  10/16/2026

Yeah, its a silly example, but I really can’t use any of my customer’s plans on here