What Is Microsoft Project?
Microsoft Project is a family of tools for planning and coordinating work. It helps teams organize tasks, connect dependencies, assign resources, and manage schedules, costs, and reporting when a simple to-do list is not enough. The available tools and capabilities differ across the Project product family.
How a Project plan fits together
Section titled “How a Project plan fits together”The central idea is a plan that describes both the work and the conditions under which it can happen.
- A task is a unit of work with a duration or dates. Tasks can be linked so that one follows, overlaps, or otherwise depends on another.
- A resource is something used to complete the work. It is often a person, but it can also be equipment or material. Desktop Project supports work, material, and cost resource types.
- An assignment connects a resource to a task and records the planned share of that resource’s time. For example, a person can be assigned at 50 percent or 100 percent.
- A calendar defines working and non-working time. Base calendars provide templates for project, task, and resource calendars; those calendars determine working time, so holidays, shifts, leave, and equipment availability can affect dates.
These pieces make a schedule more than a set of dates. When tasks are automatically scheduled and connected by dependencies, changing one task can move related work. Constraints, calendars, resource assignments, and other scheduling settings can also affect the result. That automation is useful for exploring “what if” changes, but the plan still depends on the assumptions entered by the project team.
Who uses it?
Section titled “Who uses it?”Project is commonly used by project managers and the people maintaining or performing scheduled work. In larger organizations, resource managers use the resource information and portfolio managers use shared project data to see work across projects. The exact roles depend on the edition and deployment.
Desktop, server, cloud, and Planner names
Section titled “Desktop, server, cloud, and Planner names”“Microsoft Project” can refer to several related products. They share planning concepts, but they are not interchangeable applications.
| Product or service | What it means |
|---|---|
| Project desktop | The installed application for detailed schedule creation and editing. |
| Project Server | The on-premises enterprise platform for shared project and portfolio management. |
| Project Online | A hosted service with Project Web App, retired on September 30, 2026. Its related setup and administration guidance is historical. The Project Online Desktop Client was a separate desktop application that could connect to the service; it was not simply a web version of desktop Project.1 |
| Project for the web | Microsoft’s former cloud project product, built on Power Platform and Dataverse, with grid, board, timeline, and dependency-oriented scheduling experiences. Its transition into Planner is historical context rather than a current setup instruction. |
| Planner | Microsoft’s broader work-management experience, which now includes capabilities that were previously associated with Project for the web. Exact names, plans, and availability can change.2 |
Project Online retired on September 30, 2026. Product names and availability have changed over time, so dated announcements should be read as historical context rather than current instructions.
Project files at a glance
Section titled “Project files at a glance”The standard desktop Project plan file is MPP (.mpp). It stores a working schedule and related plan data; it is a file format, not a Project edition or cloud service. For details, see What Is an MPP File?, Project file formats, and MPP compatibility across Project versions. Those pages cover templates and exchange formats, version differences, and practical file handoffs.
You can also work with MPP files without Microsoft Project installed: Project Plan 365 is an independent Microsoft Project alternative for opening, editing, and saving them.
Project is software, not a methodology
Section titled “Project is software, not a methodology”Project provides a way to record work, model dependencies, calculate dates, and communicate status. A project-management methodology is the approach a team uses to decide how work is selected, planned, governed, and delivered. The same Project features can support different organizational methods; using Project does not, by itself, choose a methodology for the team.