At Emerald Associates, we’ve worked with many clients who’ve had to migrate standalone databases over to a shared environment in Primavera P6. One of the struggles they often face is getting their EPS structures and global data out of their standalones and into their new Cloud environments, especially when their databases are in a SQLite format.
Written by Valerie Nicholson, B.A. - Implementation Specialist
on Tuesday, 11 March 2025.
Posted in P6-Loader
Better resource assignment and unique loading options, record action column, and backup of layouts
Written by Ravi Wallau
Better resource assignment and unique loading options, record action column, and backup of layouts
New Features
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Better resource assignment and unique loading options - an auto-assignable UDF in the resource assignments can be used to match UDFs when loading and is assigned automatically when loading and extracting resource assignments.
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Record action column - adds the ability to specify which action is expected from that record. For example, if you want to ensure that a given user can only be updated but not inserted, the action would be UPDATE.
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Layout backup option - you can now include layouts, reports, changes and filters in the daily P6-Loader backup.
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Export shift/shift periods from Primavera P6 and convert shift and shift periods from XER/XML files.
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Allow custom "CLEAR" cell values, and the value <CLEAR> is the default value to clean up P6 field values, UDFs, and codes.
on Tuesday, 30 July 2024.
Posted in News, P6-Loader
Learn about the new features in P6-Loader v14.
Emerald just released P6-Loader v14 that features additional enhancements/functionality based on feedback from one of our clients.
The client wanted to add duplicate resources to activities using P6-Loader and also control what type of action to perform on a row in the P6-Loader sheet.
Written by Sue Fermelia - Implementation Specialist
on Wednesday, 17 July 2024.
Posted in P6-Loader
Financial periods must be created manually in P6. It is a tedious process mainly because it seems that it would be so easy to automate it! Well, with the P6-Loader, you can.
In the P6-Loader, the financial period is a global object you can export.
Written by Ravi Wallau - Integration Specialist
on Monday, 06 May 2024.
Posted in All Articles, P6-Loader
Easier Hierarchies and Fragnet Templating
Written by Ravi Wallau
Easier Hierarchies and Fragnet Templating
New Features
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Easier to work with hierarchical fields - WBS, Resources, Roles, Codes, EPS, OBS, and Cost Accounts.
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Full path extracting and loading for all hierarchical codes makes working with these hierarchies easier in Excel. Several new fields were added including the full code path field and a field showing the level of the hierarchy. This makes building hierarchies in Excel easier and loading them into P6 less error prone. Separator definitions are now also configurable.
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Allows importing of WBS with their codes (without needing the path) if they are unique across a project
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WBS template fragnet loader - You can take advantage of WBS templates built in P6 within P6-Loader to copy WBS nodes, activities, resources assignments, logic, steps, and expenses from one or many templates and fill in any placeholders for activity ID and names as you generate new WBSs into your project. You can also assign UDFs and codes to WBS, activities and resource assignments while applying a template. This is like the old P3 Fragnets on steroids.
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Improving the handling of spread information to allow quarterly and yearly spread extractions are back. Manual spread loading of these spread periods is not supported.
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Automatically starts activities when loading resource assignment period actuals.
Enhancements
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Better error handling with the API when loading batches and better controlling of batching.
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Includes project names and activity names in the relationship sheet when extracting.
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Fixes a problem that would occur when trying to extract project data with no projects selected.
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Better use of UI space in the bottom toolbar.
on Friday, 09 February 2024.
Posted in News, P6-Loader
Recently, a client of ours was using P6 Pro Client with P6 Pro Cloud Connect and had the caching option enabled. This user was using an older version of P6, 18.8, and in this version, problems with P6 Pro Cloud Connect were much more common than in the current version. The user would log into P6, logging in would take a few seconds, and then P6 would just crash. We checked the user configuration and disabled caching, and the user was able to login into P6 after that.
However, the user soon noticed that some of the projects he was working on were gone. What happened?
Written by Ravi Wallau - Integration Specialist
on Wednesday, 13 December 2023.
Posted in All Articles, P6-Loader
Have you ever had a critical piece of data deleted in your Primavera P6 database and needed to recover it?
A client of ours had just this sort of scenario.
The user reached out to us in a panic. This user had just been given increased access in P6 and had renamed an existing UDF. He realized it was renamed improperly and instead of changing the name of the UDF, he deleted it. The project level User Defined Field (UDF) had data assigned to many of their projects. They needed to recover it and ensure the values were reinstated on their projects. We were able to recover the data in less than and hour and a half.
Written by Sue Fermelia - Implementation Specialist
on Friday, 25 August 2023.
Posted in All Articles, P6-Auditor, P6-Loader
Recently, I was working with a client who was reorganizing. This client has many business units (BU) that work in the same database, so they have a prefixing standard for each BU.
When they reorganized, all the prefixing for several BUs needed to be brought into alignment with the reorganized BU structure. This involved moving their EPS structure around and updating the prefixes on calendars, codes, resources and roles. I had started moving the structures to accommodate the changes and updating the prefixes with P6-Loader, but I also did some updating directly in P6. I had completed roles and was partially through resources when the client realized their reporting may be effected by the changes. They wanted to revert all the changes I had made. While I did have several P6-Loader change files that I could use to revert the changes I made using P6-Loader, I wanted to be sure the manual changes I made were also restored.
Written by Sue Fermelia - Implementation Specialist
on Thursday, 29 June 2023.
Posted in All Articles, P6-Loader
A solution for common cases of accidental data deletion in Primavera P6
Accidental deletion of important data is something that happens. Everyone has done it at some point.
In Primavera P6 EPPM, some of the most common cases of accidental data deletion are:
- Deletion of the wrong resource
- Deletion of the wrong project
- Deletion of the wrong WBS node or nodes
Written by Ravi Wallau - Integration Specialist, Sue Fermelia - Implementation Specialist
on Tuesday, 16 May 2023.
Posted in All Articles, P6-Auditor, P6-Loader, Primavera P6
Your project schedule will be created in P6, and you are looking to provide the best schedule tools for your project team. What can you add to your team tool kit to assist the project team, address building the schedule, monitor schedule quality, utilize options for updating the schedule and make reporting quick and easy? Let’s look at a few examples for some food for thought.
Written by Mary Lynn Backstrom, PMP, PMI-SP, PMI-BA – Implementation Specialist
on Friday, 10 February 2023.
Posted in All Articles, P6-Loader, P6-QA, P6-Reporter, TAPS
In P6, identifying each specific project using each UDF in a quick, consolidated, easy to use manner can be very challenging. With ten subject areas where UDFs can be created and the ability to create an unlimited number of UDFs, the complete list of UDFs in a P6 database can be very large. The ability to quickly create a consolidated report telling you exactly which project each UDF is being used in can be very useful.
Written by Mary Lynn Backstrom, PMP, PMI-SP, PMI-BA – Implementation Specialist
on Saturday, 21 January 2023.
Posted in All Articles, P6-Loader
We all have had it happen in P6. Somehow, a project or global data goes missing or gets changed and we need to restore data from a backup. Usually, this means contacting the IT department and having them restore, at the very least, a previous version of the project or even the entire database. Our IT departments are busy, and often, P6 is not the only software they are supporting. Sometimes, this means we need to wait to get our data rolled back to a previous backup copy, which may not be convenient. In some cases, a full backup may need to be restored instead of just the one project we need which causes extra work to get the changes made to all those other unaffected projects.
P6-Loader now has the functionality to automatically create XML and/or P6-Loader XLXS format backups of projects and global data and provide a means in which to self-serve restoring data from a given time. The backups can be set to run daily, weekly or monthly and can easily be accessed and downloaded through P6-Loader.
Written by Sue Fermelia - Implementation Specialist
on Friday, 09 September 2022.
Posted in All Articles, P6-Loader
Recently, I worked with a client who is combining several business units (BUs) into one database on the Oracle Cloud. Several of the BUs were already working in Primavera P6 which made importing those projects the best solution for these groups; however, we had one BU who was working in MS Project. They were using predefined project templates based on the OPM lifecycle set forth by their organization in P6 to create the existing projects, so importing the MS XMLs would not work properly to get their projects into P6.
Written by Sue Fermelia - Implementation Specialist
on Friday, 29 July 2022.
Posted in All Articles, P6-Loader
Our latest version of the P6-Loader brings the ability to automate the backups out of P6 even from the Oracle P6 Cloud.
Written by Ravi Wallau
Our latest version of the P6-Loader brings the ability to automate the backups out of P6 even from the Oracle P6 Cloud.
New Features
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Automation! The P6-Loader can now export files to the P6-Loader Excel and P6 XML (or both) formats on a daily and/or weekly and/or monthly frequency.
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Global data automation - if automation is turned on for a given database, a full export of the database's global data is performed every day - it includes EPS, OBS, resources, roles, users, code dictionaries, UDF types, risk definitions, etc.
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The list of tasks is not cleared when the P6-Loader is restarted.
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P6 XML support - the P6-Loader can now export files to the P6 XML format.
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Restore and administer your data more easily - with the ability to download the project and global files for a database as it was at a given point in time, recovering lost data and administering the database becomes much easier.
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Resource assignment duplicate handling! It is now possible to load resource assignments even if you have duplicates in your P6 database. You can use the internal ID of the resource assignment or pick one or more UDFs to help the P6-Loader match the right one.
on Thursday, 14 July 2022.
Posted in News, P6-Loader
One of the most challenging things you can run across when administering data in your Primavera P6 environment is multiple User Defined Fields (UDFs) that have been created for the same information. This often occurs when users are working on projects that need a particular piece of information and don’t realize there is a UDF already created for another project for the same information. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to merge those duplicate UDFs without losing the data already in them?
Written by Sue Fermelia - Implementation Specialist
on Wednesday, 29 June 2022.
Posted in All Articles, P6-Loader
