The reign of Primavera Project Planner, known to all as P3 ended in 2009 after 16 years of service.  However, its popularity has continued to sustain its use in some areas of industry and government, even though maintenance releases have long since ceased.  And now, as Windows XP follows the same path of extinction, keeping P3 alive has become increasingly impractical.

Thus, from time to time we are asked to migrate a customer’s Primavera Project Planner (P3) projects into Primavera P6.  Transferring a P3 project to P6 is pretty straightforward provided that certain conditions are true in P3 prior to attempting the conversion.  The following are some guidelines for commonly encountered items that you may find useful, whether you’re attempting this transfer yourself or having Ten Six do it for you.  For your convenience, you can download a PDF version of these guidelines here.

The following article describes some guidelines for providing Ten Six Consulting with P3 backup files in order to convert your projects to Primavera P6. Please read these guidelines before exporting your P3 project(s).

Primavera Project Planner (P3) Project Overview

Some project settings can prevent the import of a P3 project to Primavera P6. Please verify the following settings prior to exporting your P3 Project.

Project Overview Dialog

Open the Project Overview dialog using the File | Project Overview… menu, and verify that the project falls within the following guidelines.

1 – The Project name: value should contain alphanumeric ASCII characters only, i.e. A – Z and 0 – 9. The project name should not contain any special characters such as #, $, -, %, &. If it does, create a copy of the project in P3 and rename it so that only letters and numbers are used in the name.

2 – The Access: value should be Read Write. If this is Read Only or Restricted, please reopen the project in P3 and use the Access… button to change the access for all users to Read Write.

Exporting the P3 Project Using Backup

Use the Tools | Project Utilities | Back Up… menu option to open the Backup dialog.

In the Back Up dialog, select the P3 project to back up making sure that the “Remove access list during backup” is NOT selected.

Note: if the backup is performed with the “Remove access list during backup” option checked, the project will be backed up as a single-user project and will likely not load into P6 Professional.

When the backup is complete, open the Windows file explorer. Locate and select all the P3 project’s backup *.P3 files and send them to a Compressed (zipped) Folder.

The resulting zipped *.P3 files should then be sent to Ten Six Consulting for conversion to a Primavera P6 *.XER project format.