Import a SharePoint project list as a portfolio

Many teams track their projects in one big SharePoint list: a row per project, with columns for status, owner, dates, health and budget. Onplana can read that list and create a project for every row, all in one portfolio, so the tracker becomes a working portfolio without retyping anything.

What you need

• A Business or Enterprise plan. The import creates a portfolio, which is a Business feature.
• Permission to create projects and to manage portfolios (Owners, Admins and Managers have both by default).
• Your Microsoft account connected in Settings, Accounts, with SharePoint access allowed. If it is connected without SharePoint access, the import asks you to reconnect.

Import the list

1. Open Import (Settings group of the sidebar, or go to /migrate) and choose SharePoint list of projects.

2. Pick the site. Sites you follow are listed first; type in the search box to find any other site you can read.

3. Pick the list you track projects in, then choose Map the columns.

4. Check the column mapping. Onplana matches the columns it recognises (Title or Project, Status, Owner or Project Manager, Start, End or Finish, Health or RAG, Budget, Description) and you can change any of them. Only the project name is required.

5. Tick any other columns you want to keep. Each ticked column becomes a project custom field with the same name.

6. Name the portfolio. It defaults to the list’s name. If a portfolio with that name already exists, the projects join it.

7. Read the preview. It shows the first five rows as the projects they will become, and counts what happens to the rest.

8. Choose Import. When it finishes you see a result for every row and a link to the portfolio.

How each column is read

List column	Becomes
Title or project name	the project name (rows without one are skipped)
Status	the project status: words like Not started, In progress, On hold, Done and Cancelled are understood; anything else starts as Planning
Owner (a person or an email)	the project owner, when that person is a member of your organization
Start and end dates	the project dates; a missing end defaults to 90 days after the start
Health	a project custom field called Health
Budget	the project budget (currency symbols and separators are ignored)
Description	the project description

Owners who are not members

Nobody is invited by the import. If a row’s owner is a member of your organization, they own the project. If not, you own it and their email is written in the project’s description, so you can invite them yourself later.

Running it again

Onplana remembers which list item each project came from. Running the import again on the same list skips every row already imported and creates only the new ones, so it is safe to re-run after the list grows. A very long list imports over several runs in the same way.

Note

Each imported project is created the way a new project is. Workflows and integrations that run when a project is created run once for each imported project.

FAQ

Does the import change my SharePoint list? No. Onplana only reads the list.

Can I import tasks from a SharePoint list instead? This import makes one project per row. To bring in a plan’s tasks, use Import from Microsoft Project or Import a WBS from Excel or CSV.