Baselines
Project Baselines (Baseline / Baseline1–10)
Baseline / Baseline1–10 Start/Finish/Duration/Work vs P6 targets
What Microsoft stores
A baseline is a snapshot of scheduled values. Microsoft: nearly 20 reference points in five categories — start, finish, duration, work, cost. You can save 11 baselines per project: the unnumbered Baseline plus Baseline 1 through Baseline 10.
When you set a baseline, Project copies the currently scheduled fields into the matching baseline fields.
| Field | Microsoft meaning |
|---|---|
| Baseline Start | planned beginning at save time (copy of Start). "NA" until set |
| Baseline Finish | planned completion at save time (copy of Finish). "NA" until set |
| Baseline Duration | original span (copy of scheduled duration). "0 days" until set |
| Baseline Work | total planned person-hours (copy of Work). "0 hours" until set |
Variance fields (Start/Finish/Work Variance, etc.) use the unnumbered Baseline, not Baseline1–10, unless you build a custom comparison.
MSPDI: repeating Task/Baseline (also on Resource and Assignment). Required child Number = "unique number of the baseline data record." Start / Finish / Duration / Work / Cost are optional children. Timephased baseline data is optional. Unverified: whether Number 0 is the unnumbered Baseline and 1–10 are Baseline1–10 — that is the natural reading, not an Oracle/Microsoft sentence we fetched.
Interim plans are not baselines: they save only current start and finish (up to 10). Do not map them to P6 baselines.
Contrast with P6
| P6 | Project | |
|---|---|---|
| Snapshot | Separate baseline project (copy of the project) | Fields on the same task (Baseline0–10) |
| How many in use | Many exist; four assigned at once (Project + 3 user) | 11 field sets on the task |
| Activity planned dates | TASK.target_start_date / target_end_date (Planned — not baseline) | Start / Finish (current), Baseline* (snapshot) |
| In XER | Professional table: XER does not carry baselines | MSPDI Baseline elements can |
| In P6 XML | XML does carry baselines | n/a |
Do not map P6 planned/target dates to Project Baseline Start/Finish. Planned dates keep moving until the activity starts (Oracle). Baseline fields stay put until you set/clear them (Microsoft).
See p6/baselines.md. Never write a real MPP to hold baselines; generate MSPDI (convert/mpxj.md).