A couple of month’s back I published an article called Fill Down Examples in Primavera P6 Professional that looked at some of the ways you can save data entry time by using the Fill Down feature.
It was recently pointed out to me by a colleague that the article doesn’t mention one of the most commonly used Fill Down shortcuts in the Primavera P6 community, namely the Ctrl + E keyboard shortcut key.
Scratching my head for a few minutes trying to fathom why I would have neglected to mention such a coveted shortcut, of which I have been aware of and using for 10 years, I suddenly remembered the reason for my selective amnesia; it doesn’t work very well in Primavera P6 Professional R8.3 – the version I used to develop the original article. And therein lays the nub of this article – which should have been titled “What’s up with Crtl + E these days?” or even “CTRL+E – WTF?”.
In versions up to and including R7.0, the Fill Down feature could be invoked using the Ctrl + E shortcut for almost any “fill down” situation. It was awesome and anyone I showed it to was always delighted to have such a feature at their disposal. What a wonderful timesaver.
However in P6 version R8.3, that same option is almost always greyed out in the Edit menu and thus unavailable as a shortcut option.
The earlier article offered the right-click option to do a fill down on your stuff, and didn’t talk about this Ctrl + E feature for this reason. And so far I haven’t been able to isolate when it does go active in P6 R8.3, partly due to lack of available time to play around with it, and partly because I’ve gotten used to going straight to the right-click menu and not even bothering to find out what mood my Fill Down feature might be in today.
Whatever’s going on, it’s worth pointing out that for anyone on an upgrade path to Primavera P6 R8.3 from the earlier R6.2 and R7.0 versions, the Ctrl + E feature “don’t work like it use ta”.
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