Welcome to ProjectEngine — questions, feedback and real-world use cases #2

Seems to work well, no errors and Baseline Finish calculations are showing up.
I will keep testing it and let you know if anything else comes up.
Thanks for the shout-out on the release page!

Oooh such a great news ! I'm so glad I managed to fix it.

And the shoutout was definitely deserved ! Thanks to you I discovered that all the native English speakers may have never went further that the opening.

I kept your recommandations in minds for later versions as I really needed so release this fix of several game breaking bugs.

If you find any more bugs or any other major missing please feel free to come back and let me know 😊

Quick follow-up, since your original feedback ended up triggering a much broader internationalization cleanup than I initially expected.

Your 32-bit / English Excel case was the starting point, but the audit uncovered several deeper assumptions in the workbook around language, date formats and visible table headers.

The next release will therefore include a much more complete internationalization pass:

• visible table headers can now be physically switched between English and French instead of relying on the old duplicated translated header rows;
• the scheduling engine no longer depends on the visible English header text internally;
• date display can be selected globally as DMY, MDY or ISO, independently from the interface language;
• language changes are now explicit and click-driven instead of being reapplied automatically by unrelated workflows;
• the VBA import pipeline was hardened to avoid accented-character corruption;
• WBS onboarding help has also been made compatible with Excel versions that do not support modern threaded comments, using classic Notes as a fallback.

The older duplicated translation rows have also been removed, so the workbook layout is noticeably cleaner.

Most importantly for your original case, the formula handling remains language-independent and the changes have been validated without changing the planning analytics.

So your feedback did not just fix the Baseline Finish / formula issue in v1.2.5 — it ended up exposing a much larger internationalization debt that is now being removed properly.

Thanks again for being the first person to push the workbook through a genuinely different Excel environment. That feedback was far more useful than I expected when you first reported it.

One last follow-up: v1.2.6 is now released.

As far as the issues and internationalization points you originally raised are concerned, everything should now be in place:

• the language-dependent formula problem that blocked your Baseline Finish calculation remains fixed;
• English and French Excel environments are no longer tied to English physical table headers internally;
• the visible table headers can now genuinely switch between EN and FR;
• the old duplicated translation rows are gone;
• date display can now be selected as DMY, MDY or ISO from SETTINGS;
• the localization lifecycle has been cleaned up so unrelated updates no longer reapply language changes behind the scenes.

So v1.2.6 should be much closer to the workbook behavior you were expecting when you first tried ProjectEngine.

Since you are using it in a real Civil Engineering project-management context and on an English 32-bit Excel environment, I would be very interested to know how this version behaves for you in practice.

And of course, if some of the workflow questions you originally mentioned — especially around the different Update buttons or the Baseline / Actual / Forecast behavior — still feel unclear after using 1.2.6, please tell me. Those are exactly the kinds of usability issues I want to improve next.

Sounds great, I will try to give it another try with the updated version and let you know what I find!

You have inspired me to try my hand at creating a "Plain Text" project scheduler engine as a side project. Once I get a workable version up and running, would love to have someone else give it a try. May be a challenge getting internationalization worked out, but I will let you know if I ever get to that point.

Cheers.