Range Copy/Range Paste, Project Count, CPP Format Export, Import from Excel

There are several new pieces of functionality in P6 Professional v23.10. We will start with a high level look at a few of the elements. One of the new pieces of functionality added allows users to paste multiple data entries from Excel directly into P6 Professional using range copy/range paste. Copy/Paste of a range is available in both directions: Excel to P6 or P6 to Excel. From P6 to Excel select the range, right click and select Range Copy (or use Shift+Ctrl+C), and then paste the range into Excel.

From P6 to Excel select the range, right click and select Range Copy (or use Shift+Ctrl+C), and then paste the range into Excel.

Have you seen these new features? They were added in Primavera EPPM version 23.10.

Additions to Viewing Current & Recent User Sessions

By selecting the User Sessions page from the User Menu, users can view information about their recent sessions.

Let’s take a quick look at the Check Schedule Toolbar functionality in P6 v23.12.1. (This toolbar was put into P6 in v22.4.)



Enabling the Check Schedule toolbar displays the toolbar icons below.



Working across the Check Schedule toolbar, the functions behind the icons are shown.

Primavera P6 utilizes CPM or Critical Path Method Scheduling. Using the activity information in a P6 schedule file, the early and late dates are calculated when the project is scheduled. P6 uses the activity durations and the relationships between the activities to calculate schedule dates. The schedule calculations are completed in two passes: the forward pass in the scheduling process calculates the early dates of each of the activities and the backward pass calculates the late dates. If the activity information (durations or logic) in your P6 schedule is incomplete or incorrect, scheduling results will be affected.

Do you monitor the ‘What’s New’ information for new versions of Primavera P6? Here are a few things to keep in mind when working in the P6 Client. For those using P6 v20.4 (or higher), there are a couple of new pieces of functionality (introduced in v20.4 of P6 Professional) that can prove helpful. This functionality allows the addition of comments about relationships as well as the functionality allowing role prices to vary over time.

Regarding the functionality to add comments about relationships, I am not suggesting that every relationship line in your P6 schedule requires comments added; however, in some circumstances it can be a handy functionality. The comments column can be added in the relationship details tab (predecessors/successors or relationships) and then the comments required can be added. Perhaps you have a lag on the relationship, or, like below, you want to confirm a relationship. Relationship comments are plain text and can be up to 250 characters long.

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

In this article I will visit some of the data a user may be utilizing in Primavera P6 and how it is handled or not handled in Oracle Primavera Cloud (OPC). These are some of the differences found that may be of interest to current Primavera P6 users.

Your project schedule has been created with no resource curves incorporated. (Resource curves are not always required.) Suddenly, during project execution and reporting, the project is displaying issues. Budget labor, actual labor units and at completion labor units are out of sync. In checking your schedule, it is one section of the schedule which looks to be displaying the issue. You find one of the schedulers has added resource curves to activity resources. At the time of the change, a number of the activities already had progress posted to them. What can happen when resource curves are added or changed after progress has been posted to activities? (Please note this is an example of what can happen given the settings and information scenario that was present at the time. My intent is purely to share what can happen.)

In the P6 toolbars choices, an Activity Critical Path toolbar is now available. Let’s have a quick look at the icons.

We have been using P6 v18.x with several clients and have seen some differing behavior related to caching. It appears the problem may have started as early as P6 v16.x. These clients are in varying environments; P6 Oracle SaaS, EAI Hosted, and on-premise - In short, anywhere where Oracle Cloud Connect is utilized.

We were excited to see the new form of caching that appeared in v17.x. We have clients with poor internet access and P6Web is not adequate for their needs - they need P6 Client. Everyone knows that P6 Client is very chatty and needs good bandwidth to work properly, so the idea that we can cache data and do heavy lifting on our desktop rather than on the server far away was great.

Remember our good old friend the POBS Table? Well, we have a new friend in town that is introducing itself to our database in the form of the RISKTYPE table. We have discovered numerous clients are importing XER files to their database that include a large number of Risk Categories, sometimes tens of thousands of them. No one knows where they originated, but they are multiplying and wreaking havoc.

The problem comes when an export file is created with unwanted Risk Types and imported into another database, creating more values in the destination database. The destination database then could share their large number of Risk Types to another database. Each time, the RISKTYPE table is passed along, it grows, spreading and infecting more and more databases.

Are you importing schedules into scrubbing databases, taking out all the unwanted data you don't want to pollute your production database, re-exporting the schedule and then importing it into the database where it should have gone in the first place?

Do you have required specifications your contractors need to follow for their schedules, but have a hard time knowing whether those details are missing or incorrect until you've already imported them?

Do you want to ensure you are not importing POBS tables and corrupted RISKTYPE tables?

That's a lot of quality assurance to do! Maintaining your corporate data standards for dashboarding and reporting can be a full time job, especially when project teams have their own coding structures and requirements for their P6 Environment.

Don't worry; there's relief. Emerald has developed a new tool that will do all that work for you! We are now introducing P6-Scrubber.

When a new client request comes in, you can create a project from ZOHO CRM. For us projects come in several categories and we have task list templates ready to be used to create tasks to charge to. Typically the first task list is Business Development. We kick off with that and assign the team working on the initiative. We can then send the project, the task list, the tasks and the resources into P6. We can do that in one step or two depending on the task list development. In this case we have a good idea of the scope of work and were able to put it together with 2 task lists. So we can integrate bot the project and the WBS/tasks and resources right away. So we use a really simple user interface tight in ZOHO projects to kick this off into P6. We tell the integration to send both the project and WBS over. Once that is done, we can go into P6 and start actionining the work. We also get a message letting us know if there were any issues with the intgration, such as a duplicate project exisiting. If all is good, you should get a PASS message both for the project and for the WBS.

Are you finding when you are importing or exporting a large number of projects that not all the projects are coming across when they are imported?

While converting a client from P6 V8.3 to V15.2, we found the data was not always transferred completely when we migrated large numbers of projects. Instead, with XER file sizes larger than 100,000 KB not all projects were exported and/or imported. We confirmed this recently on a subsequent project with a different client where we were migrating projects from P6 V7.3 to V17.12 and encountered the same issue.

In the first case, we exported the projects using an XER. Our file was over 300,000 KB. We found 4-5 projects were not exported. When we imported the same file, there were 2-3 additional projects that were not imported to the new database.

We looked at additional files for the same client and found that in XER files with a size larger than approximately 100,000 KB there were several projects in each XER missing when the file was imported.

Once we reduced the number of projects in the exported XER files to keep the file size under 100,000 KB, we found no projects were lost and our data was accurate.

Keep an eye on XER files larger than 100,000 KB when importing and exporting, they may not have complete data in them once they are imported.

In P6, identifying which projects are using each Activity Code in a quick, consolidated, easy to use manner is challenging. Especially when you consider some clients have a LOT of baselines.

But is this is r-e-a-l-l-y information we need to be able to capture? In my experience, there are a number of scenarios where that answer is a resounding “Yes”! One common example – the Activity Codes Dictionary needs to be cleaned up.