Interchange
Your programme is someone else's file.
The main contractor issues P6. The client wants MS Project. A subcontractor sends a spreadsheet. Nobody is changing tools because you did. A scheduler that cannot read those files is one you keep a second licence beside. LumaPlan reads them directly, and writes them back.
Formats
What it opens, and what it writes.
| Format | From | Read | Write | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
.mpp | MS Project | Yes | Via .mspdi | Opens directly — no export step first, MPP9 through MPP14. Writes back as .mspdi, which MS Project opens natively. |
.mspdi / .xml | MS Project | Yes | Yes | Round-trips through MS Project itself, field for field. |
.xer | Primavera P6 | Yes | Yes | The format the industry actually exchanges. |
.pmxml | Primavera P6 | Yes | Yes | The XML variant, for tools that prefer it. |
.mpx | Exchange | Yes | Yes | The old lingua franca, still in the chain more often than people admit. |
.xlsx | Excel | Yes | Yes | Import a task list; export rows, resources or the current view. |
.lplan | LumaPlan | Yes | Yes | The native file. Round-trips everything the other formats drop. |
Out the other side: PDF submittals with a timescaled Gantt, a what-you-see print of the current view, XLSX, PPTX, PNG and SVG.
Fidelity
An importer is only as good as what it drops.
LumaPlan's readers are checked field by field against what the tool
that wrote the file actually produced, on large real-world
programmes rather than toy samples. Where a format genuinely cannot carry
something, the native .lplan file keeps it.
Calendars, exceptions and shifts
Per-weekday multi-shift working time and holiday exceptions arrive intact — because a calendar that quietly degrades to Mon–Fri nine-to-five moves every date downstream of it.
Constraints, types and progress
Constraint types, task types, percent-complete types, actual dates, remaining duration. The fields that decide where the engine puts an activity — not just where the bar was drawn.
Resources, cost and codes
Assignments with units and curves, time-phased rates, cost accounts, activity codes and the WBS — kept against the activities they belong to.
Conventions
MS Project and P6 do not agree on dates.
They differ on whether a finish is inclusive, how lag is counted across a non-working span, and whether a zero-duration activity gets promoted to a milestone. Feed the same logic to both and you get answers a day apart. That is the argument nobody wants to have in a progress meeting.
LumaPlan implements both conventions and makes the project choose. Import a P6 file and it schedules the way P6 does. Import from MS Project and it schedules the way MS Project does. The setting is visible in project settings, not inferred and hidden.
Open the file you were sent this morning.
No export step, no second licence, no conversion service in between. Early access is opening to teams running live work.
Bring the file with you. Drop a .mpp or .xer straight into LumaPlan and it opens on the spot — no project to set up first.