Driving Path Analysis
Up to five simultaneous driving path calculations against explicitly selected activity edges or milestones — no forced constraints or deadline tasks required.
Driving path analysis identifies which activities are controlling the schedule to any given target — not just the project end date, but any milestone or activity edge the planner selects. In most scheduling tools, running a driving path requires an uncomfortable workaround: the planner inserts an artificial deadline task at the target, forces the schedule to treat that task as a hard constraint, and then reads the resulting zero-float chain as the driving path. ProjectXL eliminates that pattern entirely.
Explicit Target Selection
Planners explicitly select the specific activity edges or milestones they want to trace. Each target gets its own independent backward pass, calculating the driving path to that exact point in the network without interference from other targets or artificial constraints. Up to five targets can be analyzed simultaneously, and the results are ranked by ascending total float — the path with the least schedule flexibility appears first.
Baseline Capture as a Lifecycle Event
Any completed schedule calculation can be captured as a named baseline snapshot — an immutable record of the plan at that moment. Baseline capture is a deliberate lifecycle event rather than an automatic field overwrite, which means planners can take multiple snapshots during planning without overwriting authoritative historical records. The active baseline is a designation applied to any saved snapshot, not a separate set of columns.