Import a WBS from Excel or CSV

Plenty of real project plans live in a spreadsheet: a Nivel or Level column, a dotted WBS code (1.2.3), a task per row. If that describes your file, you do not need Microsoft Project to get it into Onplana. Upload the .xlsx or .csv directly and the importer rebuilds the tree, phases, work packages and subtasks, exactly as your sheet describes it.

What Onplana reads from your sheet

Your column	Becomes
Task Name / Nombre de la Tarea	the task title (the only required column)
Level / Nivel / Outline Level	the task’s depth in the tree
WBS / ID (1, 1.1, 1.1.1)	depth and parent, from the code itself
Parent / Parent WBS	an explicit parent reference
Start, Finish / Fecha Inicio, Fecha Fin	task dates
% Complete / % Completado	progress (50% or 0.5 both work)
Duration / Duración (5d, 2w, 8h)	estimated hours
Owner / Responsable	the assignee, matched by email when the cell contains one
Milestone / Hito	the milestone flag
Notes / Descripción	the task description

Headers are matched case-, accent- and punctuation-insensitively, in English and Spanish. Anything Onplana cannot match is simply ignored, and you can re-point any column by hand before importing.

Tip

Starting from a blank sheet? Download the pre-formatted template from the upload step (Download our Excel template), it carries the canonical headers plus four example rows showing how phases and subtasks nest.

How the hierarchy is detected

Spreadsheets do not carry an explicit outline the way Microsoft Project files do, so Onplana looks for the strongest signal your sheet actually has, in this order:

1. A level column, 1 for phases, 2 for work packages, 3 for subtasks.
2. Dotted WBS codes, 1.1.2 sits under 1.1, which sits under 1.
3. A parent column, each row naming its parent’s WBS code or id.
4. Indentation, leading spaces in the task name, which is what you get when a Microsoft Project plan is pasted into Excel.

If the sheet carries both a level column and WBS codes (most real WBS exports do), they are cross-checked, and any disagreement is reported with the exact row number rather than silently resolved. A sheet with none of these imports as a flat task list, and the preview says so.

Import your file

1. Go to Import / Migrate (Administration section of the sidebar) and choose Upload Project File.

2. Select your .xlsx or .csv and press Upload & Parse. Semicolon-separated CSVs (the default from Excel in Spanish locales) and tab-separated files are detected automatically.

3. Review the Spreadsheet columns card at the top of the Field Mapping step. It shows which of your columns Onplana matched to which field, with a sample value from your file next to each guess. Re-point anything that is wrong, or set a column to (ignore), then press Re-read with these columns.

4. Continue through the preview. Every repair the importer made, a skipped outline level, a duplicate WBS code, an orphaned parent reference, is listed as a warning with its Excel row number, so nothing is quietly reinterpreted.

5. Match resources (owners found in your sheet can be invited or mapped to existing members, exactly as with a Microsoft Project import) and press Import.

Frequently asked questions

My sheet has hundreds of rows with the same four subtasks under every work package. Will that import? Yes, and in one pass. The importer handles the whole tree at once; there is no per-row or per-batch limit below the overall 20,000-task ceiling.

What about formulas? Cell values are imported, formulas are never evaluated. A cell whose formula has no saved value (for example a reference to another workbook) imports as blank, with a warning.

Do task dependencies import? Not yet from spreadsheets. A Predecessors column is recognised so nothing errors, but the links are not created, add dependencies in Onplana after import, or import a Microsoft Project file (.mpp / .xml), where dependency import is fully supported.

My accented characters look wrong. Re-save the file as CSV UTF-8 in Excel and re-upload. Onplana falls back to Latin-1 automatically for older Excel CSV exports and warns when it had to, but UTF-8 is always the safer export.

Is this available on the Free plan? Yes. Importing, including spreadsheet import, is available on every plan.