If you are a frequent user of Primavera P6 or if it is the main application that you daily use for your work, then you already know that it is one of the most NOT automated applications when it comes to data entry, it may be one the quickest and most accurate applications when it comes to calculations but the data entry process usually takes more time and effort than it really should.

So, what would you say if you knew some hacks/tips that can save hours or maybe days of your work time & effort with the same accuracy?

Looks like you are already excited, so let’s get to know 5 time-saving tips for frequent Primavera P6 users.

1. Fast Relationships Creation

When we are creating a baseline time Schedule for a project (specially “horizontal” projects) we find ourselves dealing with a huge number of repeated “fragments”, so for an example: if our project is a residential compound consisting of a large number of buildings, it’s very probable that these buildings are divided into “types”, so the logical thing to do is to create a fragment that’s going to be repeated, but we won’t repeat it until at least we link the activities together so that we don’t have to create the relationships more than once.

So here’s the tip, when you list the fragment activities, make sure to list them in the same order you want to link them using their IDs, after you do this, simply select the first activity, press the “Shift” button then select the last activity and then right click and choose “Link Activities”, this way the activities are linked in the same order as they are listed using the IDs with “FS” relationship with “0” lags.

By using this way, you avoid the hustle of the classic way of assigning relationships.

2. Fast Assigning to multiple activities

To create a reliable & professional time schedule, you will need to use a lot of assignments such as Activity Codes, Resources, Roles…etc. However, the assignment process in Primavera P6 is not the smartest or the quickest process to do the job, of course you can use Excel sheets to be imported with the data you want, but if you are a frequent user of P6 you will know that importing data from excel sometimes causes illogical and not-understandable errors that cause massive data loss. The tip to avoid errors and do the job quickly at the same time is to use the following function: select the list of activities that you want to assign a certain activity code or resource or even a certain predecessor/successor and then right click to show the list of orders you can use, in the list you’ll find the option “Assign”, once you click it a dropdown menu will appear with almost all the available assignments you can assign, select the option that you want and VOILA you completed the job in a very limited number of clicks and in the shortest time possible.

3. Save time on PDF report printing

If we are going to talk about the outputs that we mainly need from Primavera P6, one of them is going to be “printing” and it’s a very important and common output that all of us need. However, Primavera P6 is so old-fashioned when it comes to printing either reports or screenshots of the time schedule, configuring the layout and its details is boring and a little time consuming, nevertheless it’s not very useful as it should be specially the reports.

So here’s the trick, you can actually use a side application other than P6 that one of its jobs is giving you very useful and inclusive reports with the ease of sharing it with the project’s members, that application is called ScheduleReader, the app is pretty useful when it comes to printing or sharing reports, it has a lot of samples that you actually won’t need to create your own customized report, but the option is there anyway.

All you have to do is open the schedule using Schedule Reader, click on the “Reports” tab and you definitely will not need to think about printing reports from P6 again, create your customized reports or use the default ones, once you have created your own reports, simply click on the “File” Tab on the upper left side and go to reports, export your report to an “XML” file and share it with your project members. Besides being very helpful and professional, these reports take no time to be printed/exported and will save you lots of effort and time.

4. “Collapse to” Option

One of the most practical characteristics of any time schedule is a good “WBS”, but how do you define a good WBS? The answer to that is pretty simple; you need to unite the levels of the similar WBSs to have easy access to the activities in a quick way. Primavera P6 gave us a very good option in viewing any time schedule which is the “Collapse to” option, this option is very practical if you are dealing with a mega project or a very detailed project, let’s say that you want to see how are the buildings in cluster “2” in zone “3” under district “1” doing?

If your WBS levels are united, you will easily use the “Collapse-to” option to make the application simplify the view for you and show you the list of buildings you want to see in a single click.

You will find the option when you right click anywhere in the activities area of the P6 interface.

5. “Float Paths”

While I was working on a mega project horizontal project, I stumbled upon a pretty hard task which was originally caused by the internal contractual milestones, the project consisted of a large number of buildings grouped in the form of “zones”, each zone had its contractual start and finish milestones to be respected. However, in the time schedule updates each zone started to take its own direction and delays, the hard task here was to monitor and analyze each zone’s critical path and the element(s) causing the delay. That’s when I found out the trick to help me accurately and quickly extract each zone’s details, the trick is to run the schedule with every zone’s finish milestone separately. To elaborate, simply click “run” or press “F9” in your keyboard and then right before running your schedule just click on “options”, it will take you to the window where you can configure the “run” details, click on the “advanced” tab and mark the box that says “calculate multiple float paths” then check the box that uses “free float”, in the next box choose the finish milestone of the zone you want to focus on, now click “close” and run your project.

After the scheduling completes click the “group & sort” icon and choose to sort the project using “float path”, click ok and wait for the result. Using this trick we simply made the Primavera P6 focus on the chosen zone and show you all the paths that control and lead this zone, this way you can produce a very accurate and detail-oriented report showing what really is the problem in each section of the project separately to be able to monitor and solve it, and it saves the time you take to extract these information using the basic “run” option in P6.

It’s your turn

Try above Primavera P6 tips and see how much time can you save. Do you have anything to add to this list? Share your tips below.