Since we announced Oracle’s release of Primavera P6 8.2 late last year, we’ve had a little time to look at the Professional client software and some of the new features discussed in the release documentation. Here’s a few comments and screen shots for those who haven’t had an opportunity to look at the new version yet.
Enhanced Microsoft Project XML Support
For those of you working in a mixed environment of P6 and Microsoft Project, here’s something for the Microsoft Project die-hards you have to support: an update option in the Import dialog allows you to load changes from Microsoft Project schedules, rather than having to replace a prior version. P6 also now supports Microsoft Project 2010 XML formats. We’ve tested this update feature and it worked well.
New Line Numbering
Clicking on the Line Numbers button adds a column to the far left of the Activity Table and Activity Usage Spreadsheet areas. These are basically just row numbers, so sorting the data or adding activities will of course change the row numbers around for the various objects in the schedule. However this could be useful as a communication tool when wishing to refer others to a particular area of the schedule.
Timescaled Logic Diagram
Accessed under the Tools menu, the Timescaled Logic Diagram has undergone the bulk of the updates for this 8.2 release.
Enhancements include the ability to save filters with the Timescaled Logic Diagram templates.
You can now group on User Defined Fields (UDFs) in the Group and Sort tab of the Timescaled Logic Diagram template. In this next example, the IPT UDF has been selected. Note: only UDFs that contain values in the selected project(s) will appear in the pick list.
Vertical sight lines have been added to the template options so you can select them to appear on your desired calendar date intervals.
In addition to these improvements, you can now save these Timescaled Logic Diagram templates to the Primavera P6 EPPM database; useful for consistency in a mixed P6 professional/EPPM environment. Primavera has also made enhancements to the performance of this feature.
That’s about it for the P6 Professional client. We have a setup of Primavera P6 EPPM R8.2 and will be looking at the new features for that in a later blog. As always, please drop us a line if you have any comments or questions about this article or the new software.
For more Primavera P6 articles click here