forum.smartpls.com

Adding new variables to a smartPLS project need for a total redesign from scratch. In addition, when a good model is to be applied to a new data set, one has to redesign from scratch. .
Something like “add variable” would be nice. The best thing could be that smartPLS used a EXCEL file as data source (or any external file type, like txt), connecting to it at each incident. Then one also could change data source on a duplicate project.

I'm not sure I understand your problem, but SmartPLS seems to offer all what you want.
You can right click on a model and copy or duplicate it so that you do not have to build it from scratch, but can just delete or add a variable and compare different models.
You can also assign several different datasets to one project and switch between datasets (as long as they have the same variable names for the manifest indicators) for the same model.

To add a new variable to the SmartPLS, you do not need to draw a model from scratch. The easiest way, you only need to call a new set of data on the old project file, after which you simply create a new variable and run with new data sets. Perhaps this is somewhat different way, if you use WarpPLS or SPSS program.