A P6 Professional user recently asked how to change the font and color of the bars or banners in the schedule. Here’s how you do it.
In Primavera P6 Professional, it is possible to personalize your schedule. P6 has features for changing the color and font of your schedule to give it your own look. Some companies use this as a way to standardize their submissions with the same look and feel so that stakeholders know that the schedule comes from their organization.
This article demonstrates where to find features in P6 Professional to change the font and color of your schedule in preparation for final reporting.
Personalizing your schedule is not difficult. If you are a little artistic, this can be fun. The key is knowing where to look to find the P6 Professional feature for changing the color and font. The locations of some of these features are not intuitive.
Changing the Font and Color Demonstration
We have in Figure 1 our demonstration schedule report, which we want to personalize.
Banners
Our inquirer wanted to know how to modify the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) elements banners. Let us begin here.
To adjust the color and text fonts of the WBS banners, open the Group and Sort tool.
- Choose View | Group and Sort.
This brings up the Group and Sort dialogue, Figure 2.
- In the Group By section, click the Font & Color column preview field for WBS level 1, Figure 2.
- Click the Font button to change the font.
In the demonstration, I changed the font to Book Antiqua and the font color to black, Figure 3.
- Click the color button to adjust the color for the WBS Level 1 banner, Figure 4.
- Choose the hunter green basic color.
We want to make the color have a whiter tone.
- Click and move the carat in the vertical brightness bar, Figure 4.
- Click OK.
Repeat the steps to choose fonts and colors for levels 2 and 3 banners. Figure 5 displays the Group and Sort feature and respective activity table after adjusting all three banners in the schedule.
The Group and Sort dialogue works to change the font and color of your WBS banners. But what about the activity table tasks? We need to search elsewhere for this feature.
Activity Table Activity Row
To modify the task font and color, we look at the View dropdown menu.
- Choose View | Table Font and Row, Figure 6.
- In the Table Font and Row, we modify the font and then color, Figure 7.
- Choose the color button and select a basic yellow color, then adjust it to make it a whiter shade of yellow.
The schedule appears as follows:
That is not what we want. It turns both the task rows and the Gantt chart yellow.
- Change the row and Gantt chart color back to white.
We get the following:
Our schedule is looking good, but how do we change the font and color of the activity table column headings? You would think that you would right-click on any header and be able to have the feature in the popup menu. That doesn’t work. It is a mystery as to why, but software developers want you to right-click on the Gantt chart and choose not Font and Color from the popup menu but Timescale.
Column Headings
We proceed to demonstrate changing the font and color of activity table column headings.
- Right-click on the Gantt chart.
- Choose Timescale in the popup menu.
Here, we have the option to modify the font & color of the Timescale, Figure 12.
- Click to change the font.
- Click to change the color.
- Click OK.
Your personalized schedule appears in Figure 13.
Observe that the Timescale Font & Color option changed not only the column headers but also the timescale.
Finally, save your layout by choosing View | Layout | Save Layout As … This way, your personal settings are applied to any schedule by opening this layout.
Summary
Yes, it is possible to adjust the WBS banner colors and text font as well. You can also personalize the activity rows and table column headers along with the timescale. The location of the features to make these color and font modifications is not obvious. Once found, the process is straightforward. Your organization can have its preferred template saved as a layout and available for any schedule in the P6 database.