Most scheduling software programs do not normally list the day of the week activities commence. Here we step through how to create a special column listing the day of the week activities start using the global change tool.
The Primavera P6 Professional global change tool is a robust and powerful tool, but most users don’t know how to fully take advantage of it. We provided an Introduction to the Global Change Tool here.
We now build on this global change tool introduction. Our intent is twofold: 1) we want you to become more comfortable with the global change tool feature and 2) we want to show you a useful trick for listing the day of the week activities commence. It may take time and experimentation for you to become adapt at the global change tool, but, hopefully, this blog will help you along the way.
We begin our journey not with the global change tool, but with User Defined Fields (UDF). UDFs are custom data fields that you can define in P6. UDFs are another robust feature in P6 that could be the topic for another day. We briefly here describe the creation of a basic text UDF, which we need for our day of the week column. Select User Defined Fields from the Enterprise drop down menu, Figure 1.
Figure 1
Select + Add, Figure 2, in the User Defined Fields dialog.
Figure 2
Select Activities from the drop down menu, and then title the UDF ‘Start Day of Week’, Figure 3.
Figure 3
Choose Text for the data type. Use the columns feature to add the UDF ‘Start Day of Week’ column to the activities table. The resulting activities table with Gantt chart is displayed in Figure 4.
Figure 4
Great! Good progress, but we are not quite there yet!
Now we enter the global change tool by selecting Tools > Global Change, Figure 5.
Figure 5
Click the + New button in the Global Change dialog, Figure 6.
Figure 6
The Global Change dialog, Figure 7, is laid out in If-Then-Else frames similar to a software programming language routine.
Figure 7
Above select the Activities subject area so the routine is applied to activities. Enter ‘Set Day of Week’ for the Global Change Name. Because this routine applies to all activities we do not need to define any If statements. The Then statement, however, is critical, Figure 8.
Figure 8
Select ‘Start Day of Week’ as the parameter. The equivalency is ‘=’. Select ‘{DayOfWeek(Parameter)}’ as the parameter/value. Type in ‘Start’ in place of ‘Parameter’, Figure 9.
Figure 9
Select OK. Next, in the Global Change dialog click Apply Change, Figure 10.
Figure 10
The resulting schedule and populated ‘Start Day of Week’ column is displayed in Figure 11.
Figure 11
There you have it! Yes, we’ve arrived at our destination.
Summary
The global change tool is flexible and similar to your standard If-Then-Else programming language routine. Having a familiarity of UDFs and a basic understanding of the global change tool is all it takes to create a column highlighting the day of the week activities start.
Most of these steps are similar for creating a column listing the day of the week activities end. The one global change tool negative that you need to be aware of is that the ‘Start Day of Week’ UDF column is not automatically updated if your activity start dates change. You must manually enter the global change tool, select the appropriate routine, and, again, click Apply Change to update the ‘Start Day of Week’ UDFs. Make certain to do this after all activity date changes have been entered and the schedule recalculated.