Organizing Filters by Project Layouts in Primavera P6 Professional. In Primavera P6 Professional there are several different filter types including default, global, and user defined. But did you know there is also a fourth type of filter? This is the layout filter type that can be associated with a specific Layout. This can be used to help better organize your filters.
The number of filters that can be created in Primavera P6 Professional is basically limitless. However, having a huge list of filters to sort through may become a bit unwieldy. In P6 you have a set number of default filters that are particularly relevant and useful for most projects.
You also have global filters that are available to all users, and then you have user defined filters that are available to the user logged in. It’s these global and user defined filters that we may want to limit in order to streamline and better organize the filters dialog. This is possible thanks to layout filters.
This article discusses how to employ layout filters to assign filters to project layouts for better organizing and streamlining of the filters dialog.
As displayed in Figure 1, when you save a layout in Primavera P6 Professional you can make it available to All Users, Current User, or a Project.
Figure 1
In our demonstration we make the ‘Standard Layout Gear’ available to the Gear Manufacturing Project. Having done this when we open a layout by selecting ‘Layout: Standard Layout Gear’ > Layout > Open, Figure 2, we see the ‘Standard Layout Gear’ layout and all other layouts associated with the Gear project, Figure 3, in the Open Layout dialog. Again, for our demonstration we open the ‘Standard Layout Gear’ layout.
Figure 2
Figure 3
Once opened, we select the ‘Filter By’ feature in the Layout tool group at the top of the screen. This brings up the Filters dialog, Figure 4.
Figure 4
Here the top list of filters are the default filters, followed below by the global filters, and, finally, the user defined filters. To streamline our user defined filters we highlight the top two filters, which are cure time filters, and select Copy As Layout. This creates a new list of filters named Layout Filters, Figure 5.
Figure 5
Note that Layout Filters are between the Global and User Defined filters. Having assigned the cure time filters to Layout Filters we can proceed to delete both cure time filters from the User Defined filter list.
In this way we minimize the number of User Defined filters. To complete the process we select Layout: Standard Layout Gear > Layout > Save, Figure 6, which saves the two Layout filters to the Standard Layout Gear project layout.
Figure 6
Now when we open the Standard Layout User – user defined layout, Figure 7, the two cure time layouts do not appear, Figure 8.
Figure 7
Figure 8
However, when we open the Standard Layout Gear – project Gear layout, Figure 9, we see that the two cure time layouts appear in the list, Figure 10.
Figure 9
Figure 10
We thus removed the two cure time layouts from the user defined filter lists and placed them in the specific project associated layout filter list. In this way we associate filters by project layouts, and minimize the user defined list of filters displayed in the Filters dialog.
Summary
A seemingly limitless number of user defined filters can become cumbersome to handle. Primavera P6 Professional realizes that not every filter is relevant to each of your projects, so it provides a way to connect filters to project layouts.
Organizing filters by project layouts in Primavera P6 so only filters associated with a particular project layout will appear in the Layout Filters list is a great capability. Again, this becomes most helpful as the list of your applicable filters becomes long and, possibly, distributed among many projects.