There are multiple reasons why schedulers may want to change the column headings in the Activity chart. They may want to modify the names in the column headings to gain more column width so that they can compress the column to gain more space in the table. Or, they may want to personalize the column names or change the font. Often schedulers may want to change the font type so that when their table is printed it is of a professional standard to present to stakeholders.
Primavera P6 Professional supports changing fonts, modifying columns and aligning the width of columns, but these options are not always obvious. Here’s how to change these settings to suit your needs and taste.
In our project shown in Figure 1, we have a standard activity table and Gantt chart view. The column headers are all the standard titles which is the default of Primavera P6 Professional. For the purpose of this demonstration, we are going to select the ‘Budgeted NonLabor Cost’ and change the name of it.
Figure 1
To change a column heading, right click on the column headings or anywhere else in the activity table (shown in Figure 2).
Figure 2
Select columns from the popup menu, and you should see the following columns dialog box (Figure 3).
Figure 3
Select the ‘Edit Column’ button and select the column header to adjust, in this example, ‘Budgeted Nonlabor Cost’. Then select the Edit Column dialog box as shown below in Figure 4.
Figure 4
Now you can change the column title from ‘Budgeted Nonlabor Cost’ and enter a new title. We’re changin it to ‘Fixed Price Contract’ and select OK. Primavera P6 also allows you to align the text to left-hand justified, center or right-hand justified.
As you can see in Figure 5, our column heading has changed to ‘Fixed Price Contract’.
Figure 5
To change the font type in Primavera P6, you have to click on the Gantt chart. This will bring up the Timescale dialog box as shown below in Figure 6.
Figure 6
If you click on the font and color button, you can select a font style and size and select OK.
We selected Book Antiqua font in our example schedule (Figure 7) so that the change is easily visible in our activity table column headers as well as the timescale year, month and week labels. The maximum number of rows in a header is 3.
Figure 7
Summary
Changing column heading names, fonts, colors is easy in Primavera P6 and is a useful feature. It is good to know that Primavera supports all these options so that you can personalize your activity table in the way that suits you.