Microsoft Project

Microsoft Project is a project management software product, developed and sold by Microsoft. It is designed to assist a project manager in developing a schedule, assigning resources to tasks, tracking progress, managing the budget, and analyzing workloads.

Microsoft Project was the company's third Microsoft Windows-based application. Within a few years after its launch, it became the dominant PC-based project management software.

It is part of the Microsoft Office family but has never been included in any of the Office suites. It is available currently in two editions, Standard and Professional. Microsoft Project's proprietary file format is .mpp.

Microsoft Project and Microsoft Project Server are the cornerstones of the Microsoft Office enterprise project management (EPM) product.

MS-DOS versions
The first commercial version of Project was released for DOS in 1984. Microsoft bought all rights to the software in 1985. Version 4 for DOS was the final DOS version.


 * Version 1.x (1984)
 * Version 2.x (1985)
 * Version 3.x (1986)
 * Version 4.x (1986)

Windows versions
The first Windows version was released in 1990, and was labelled version 1 for Windows. There was no Version 2 on the Windows platform; the original design spec was augmented with the addition of macro capabilities and the extra work required to support a macro language pushed the development schedule out to early 1992, then released as Version 3. The 16-bit version of Project 4.0 is the last version to support Windows 3.1x and Windows NT versions 3.1 and 3.5.


 * Version 1.0 (for Windows; 1990)
 * Version 3.0 (for Windows; 1992)
 * Version 4.0 (1993)
 * Project 95 (Version 4.1a; 1995)
 * Project 98 (Version 8.0; 1997)
 * Project 2000 (Version 9.0; 1999)
 * Project 2002 (Version 10.0; 2001)
 * Project 2003 (Version 11.0; 2003)
 * Project 2007 (Version 12.0; 2007)
 * Project 2010 (Version 14.0; 2010)
 * Project 2013 (Version 15.0; 2013)
 * Project 2016 (Version 16.0; 2016)
 * Project 2019 (Version 16.0; 2019)
 * Project 2021 (Version 16.0; 2021)

Mac versions

 * Version 4.0

Subscription version

 * Microsoft 365