There is a mystery to the Primavera P6 bars dialog feature. How is it that bar definitions with no labels, never-the-less, have labels? Let’s explore this riddle.
Since its invention by Henry Gantt circa 1910, the Gantt chart has become the standard for almost every commercial scheduling software tool developed in recent years. Primavera P6 Professional of course is no exception and indeed it’s fairly certain that Mr. Gantt would be very pleased to see his invention still thriving well over 100 years after he created it. In the Primavera P6 Gantt chart there are some very powerful and flexible tools that allow you to customize the chart’s appearance to suite all manner of requirement. Included in those features is the ability to label Gantt chart bars.
This article explains the bars dialog conundrum how bar definitions with no apparent bar labels still have bar labels.
In Primavera P6 the Gantt chart’s appearance is determined by a range of settings and options in the P6 Bars dialog. To access this dialog right-click on the Gantt chart, and then pick the bars… option from the resulting dialog, Figure 1.
Figure 1
In the bars dialog scroll down to see the full list of different bar types available to you, in the particular layout you are viewing, Figure 2.
Figure 2
In Figure 2 note the bottom frame tabs in the bars dialog: bar style, bar settings, and bar labels. The bar style tab allows you to define the shape and color of each bar, which is displayed in the bars list’s preview column. The bars settings tab is where you control how bars display when collapsed and where you define how non-work time is displayed.
The bar labels tab allows you to add data labels to the left or right of a bar, selecting from a vast array of field options. If we click on the summary bar for example, Figure 3, you can see that this summary bar is set to display the finish date to the right of the summary bars along with something called ‘group name’.
Figure 3
Group name is a field that displays the name of the grouping band, based upon what is currently the grouping criteria. In this example we are grouping by the WBS. If we were grouping by some other value, say ‘area’ for example, the names of the different areas will be displayed to the right of the summary bars, thanks to this group name label.
It is the bar labels tab that is at the center of our mystery. Click on the ‘remaining work’ bar in the bars list and look at the bar labels setting, Figure 4.
Figure 4
You will observe that the remaining work bar has no defined bar labels. However, in the Gantt chart, Figure 5, we can see an activity name against the remaining work bars, despite no label definition set for that bar.
Figure 5
Note, in particular, grade site and install conduit activities non-critical bars. Now click on the critical remaining work bar; …………same story. How is Primavera P6 able to display labels against bars that have no bar labels set?
The answer is rather interesting. Scroll down the list until you see a bar named ‘current bar labels’. Click to select this bar, Figure 6, and you will see that it has an activity name label assigned to it in the bar labels tab.
Figure 6
Now click on the bar style tab, Figure 7, and the mystery is solved.
Figure 7
The current bar labels bar has no bar style configured. The shape fields are all blank, so the bar is simply not displayed. Only its labels are shown on the Gantt chart. It’s also using the normal and level of effort (LOE) filters to determine its display criteria, meaning the labels will show up against any resource dependent, task dependent, or LOE activities in the schedule.
This bar is useful because we can display or clear bar labels simply by checking/unchecking current bar labels in the display column, which is more convenient than displaying/clearing the labels for every individual bar definition separately.
Summary
The Primavera P6 bars dialog is a robust feature for customizing the Gantt chart. Bar labels may be defined for each bar definition and display according to the respective bar definition filter criteria. Further, bar definitions do not require a defined bar style or shape. In this way it is possible to apply labels and not shapes, accordingly, to multiple activity types.