Quickstart: from spreadsheet to live tracker

This guide takes you from an empty organization to a live, tracked project. It assumes your org admin has already added your account — accounts are provisioned by your organization, there is no self-serve sign-up.

1. Create the project

Open Projects and choose New project. Name it, pick the group it belongs to, and choose what it starts from: an empty project you’ll structure yourself, or one of your organization’s templates — which copies its whole phase/milestone/activity/task tree, weights and all, ready to tailor. You need the Create/configure projects permission for an empty one, or Instantiate templates to start from a template.

2. Bring in what you already have

Two ways to get structure into a project that exists:

• Import your tracker. From the project, choose Import and hand it your current .xlsx. Fieldcurve reads phases, milestones, activities, tasks, weights, percents, and owners, then shows a dry-run diff — every create, update, conflict, and warning, row by row. Nothing commits until you approve, and the commit happens in a single transaction.
• Apply a template. If your org has captured its standard program structure (a turnaround template, a CSU phase from the catalog), apply it from the project’s Project menu — its phases are added after whatever is already there, so you can combine a template with work you’ve imported.

3. Check the tree

The worksheet shows the whole Milestone → Activity → Task tree in one editable grid. Dotted numbers (like 2.1.3.4) are derived from position — they renumber themselves when structure changes, so they’re for reading aloud in meetings, never for identity. Fold levels with the per-level expand presets in the toolbar to sanity-check the shape at each altitude.

4. Weight what isn’t equal

Every item has a weight — its share of effort relative to its siblings, defaulting to 1. Where work isn’t equal, set it: the share column shows each row’s resulting percentage of its parent as you type. Untouched trees behave as plain averages, so you can weight incrementally.

5. Hand it out and sweep

Assign owners, then run your first status sweep: arrow keys to walk rows, e to edit, Spaceto fold a level shut, Enter to open a row’s panel. Update status and percent inline — each edit saves immediately (watch for the “Saved” confirmation) and rollups recompute up the tree in the same transaction. From here, the dashboard’s numbers are live doorways into the work.