ProjectEngine turns Excel into a dependency-driven scheduling and project-controls tool. It calculates task dates from FS, SS and FF links, identifies critical path and float, manages baseline, actual and forecast dates, and generates interactive Gantt charts, dashboards and S-curves. It runs locally with no installer, server or account, and the complete VBA source code is open.
I built ProjectEngine after repeatedly seeing teams expected to maintain credible project schedules while only having access to Excel. Most Excel Gantt templates are visual trackers: they display dates, but they do not calculate a dependency network or propagate changes through a schedule.
What began as a few VBA calculations gradually became a full scheduling engine. The hardest part was not drawing the Gantt, but keeping the calculation network, critical-path analytics, summary tasks, actual and forecast priorities, incremental recalculation and interactive shapes consistent with one another.
ProjectEngine is not intended to reproduce every feature of Microsoft Project or Primavera P6. It is aimed at teams already using Excel because dedicated scheduling software is unavailable, restricted or unjustified, but who still need more than a manually maintained coloured calendar.
The project is open source and still evolving. I would especially value feedback from planners, project managers and Excel/VBA developers on real-world use cases, missing capabilities and the limits of this approach.