Files, tabs and recovery

Each plan is one file ending in .dplan. Everything about the plan is in it: tasks, links, people, rates, calendars, holidays, costs, baselines, custom columns, the plan’s theme and its settings: which columns show, the date format, the dashboard dials and the rest. You can email it, keep it in a shared folder or back it up like any other file.

A few of your own preferences are not in the file: the zoom, the size of the panels, and whether the dashboard is open. They stay on your computer.

Plans from older versions of Desktop Plan, ending in .gxp, still open. When you save one, it stays a .gxp file.

The first time you save a new plan, Windows asks where to put it. The plan’s name is suggested as the file name.

A plan with unsaved changes has a * before its name in the window title and a dot on its tab.

Saving is safe even if something goes wrong halfway: Desktop Plan writes the new file in full before replacing the old one.

File › Open… (Ctrl+O) opens a plan. If you installed Desktop Plan, you can also double-click a .dplan file in File Explorer, or drag plans from File Explorer and drop them on the Desktop Plan window. Drop a Gantt Excel workbook (.xlsm or .xlsx) and it goes straight to Import.

If the plan is already open, Desktop Plan just switches to it – even if you reach the same file another way, such as through a mapped network drive.

If you pick an Excel workbook in File › Open by mistake, Desktop Plan offers to import it instead.

If the file was made by a newer version of Desktop Plan, update first. If something in a file breaks Desktop Plan’s rules (for example a holiday listed twice), it is fixed as the plan opens and you are told what changed. The file itself isn’t touched until you save.

With a licence you can have many plans open at once, each in its own tab.

Closing the last tab leaves an empty plan rather than closing the window. Each tab has its own undo.

A tab shows the file’s name. Point at a tab to see where the file is. If two open plans have the same file name, each tab also shows its folder, for example plan.dplan – Site one.

When you start Desktop Plan again, the saved plans you had open come back, in the same order. (In the free version, the plan you were working on comes back.) Plans that were never saved don’t come back this way: see the safety copies below.

The free version has your own free plan, the two sample plans, and room for one more plan to look at. Opening another plan puts it beside your free plan, in place of the one you were looking at; if you open several at once, Desktop Plan tells you which ones it did not keep open. A plan you can only look at can’t be saved over (Save is greyed), but Save As keeps a copy. Closing every tab brings your free plan back. If its file is deleted, or changed outside Desktop Plan, your free plan comes back as you last saved it the next time Desktop Plan starts, and a message tells you where it is: in its old place if the file was deleted, or beside the changed file (which you can then only look at) if it was changed. If the file is there but can’t be read, because another program is using it or it hasn’t finished downloading, Desktop Plan tells you and tries again the next time it starts.

Sample plans. Choose Help › Sample plans to open two worked example plans, a house build and an ERP system rollout, at any time. With a licence they are ordinary untitled plans: look around, close them, or rename one and save it as the start of your own plan.

To send a plan to someone who doesn’t have Desktop Plan, or to print it, export it. See Exporting to PDF and Excel.

While a plan has unsaved changes, Desktop Plan keeps a safety copy of it, a couple of seconds after each change. The safety copy is not your file: your file only changes when you save.

If Desktop Plan closes unexpectedly, the next time you open it (or open that plan) it asks:

• Recover brings the changes back. Save them to keep them.
• Discard throws the safety copy away.
• Not now keeps it and asks again next time.

Safety copies are deleted when you save or when you close a plan normally.

When several people keep plans in a shared folder (for example on Google Drive, OneDrive or a network drive), Desktop Plan does the following so you don’t overwrite each other’s work:

• While you have a plan open and can change it, it leaves a small note beside the file saying who has it open, on which computer, and since when. (A plan you can only look at, in the free version or read-only, leaves no note.)
• If someone else opens the plan while you have it, they are told, for example Amara has "Oakfield Villa Build" open on OFFICE-PC. They can Open read-only to look at it, but not change it. A banner reminds them while it is open.
• To make changes anyway, they can use Save As to save their own copy.
• If the file was saved by someone else after you opened it, Save warns you before overwriting their changes.

The note doesn’t lock the file. If two people open the same plan within a few seconds of each other, before the shared folder has synced, both may be able to edit. Agree who updates the plan.