The release of Oracle Primavera P6 Professional R8.1 has arrived sporting some excellent improvements to the interface in two particular areas:
Tabbed window layouts
Customizable toolbars and menus
I’ve been working with Primavera P6 R8.1 for some time now and found these improvements have made a huge difference to the ease of navigation. The tabbed windows allow me to quickly zip between the project, activity and other windows that I’m using during the session. I’d like to have seen the open tabs survive a restart, but for now they drop back to just one tab whenever you open Primavera P6 Professional.
More interesting to me are the completely customizable toolbars. Using these, you can really get the interface setup on your own terms for slick operation. I’m going to show you how to modify these and also offer some suggestions about changes you can make to the toolbars based upon my experiences.
Toolbar Customization
Let’s start with a look at the new interface and how the toolbars and menu look out of the box.
At first glance everything looks familiar and certainly a lot more up-to-date with no wasted space. So for those already familiar with Primavera P6, upgrading to P6 R8.1 will not mean you get busted down from expert to amateur and have to relearn the entire navigation system. No, Oracle Primavera has made just the right changes that won’t slow us veteran P6 users down in the slightest.
So let’s look at how to modify these new toolbars. Firstly, they all float, so you can rip them off the frame by dragging on the little bar at the end or just by double-clicking on it, to set it adrift. Another double-click on the header of the toolbar will place it back on the frame; which is easier than trying to drag it back.
The little arrow Icon on all the toolbars allows you to customize the Icons displayed. I published a toolbar map blog previously that shows all the available Icons.
Clicking on this little arrow opens the Add or Remove Buttons option and you can figure the rest out from there.
I think that the defaults are almost right for all the buttons displayed, except for a couple of items I have found confusing when first using this version after long exposure to Primavera P6 6.2.1.
1. The new Standard toolbar added to the top of the left-hand frame includes the New…, Open… and Close all buttons. The New… button looks a bit like the Project button in the toolbar below it, and occupies the same approximate location as the old Projects button in Primavera P6 6.2.1. Therefore, I kept clicking on it and starting the Create a New Project process when I simply wanted the project view.
Recommendation: remove the New… button from the standard menu (or remove the entire Standard toolbar).
2. No Bottom Layout: This button has been removed from the default toolbars and I kept missing it. I like to shut off the bottom layout sometimes when working on larger schedules to give me more vertical space. This button has been re-tasked too; it used to toggle the bottom layout on and off. Now it just closes it and you need to use the Details button to get it back again.
Recommendation: add the No bottom Layout button to the Bottom Layout toolbar.
3. I’m also used to the Issues and Thresholds buttons being available on the left, so I added them to the Projects toolbar. Otherwise, one has to keep going to the Projects menu to open these and as I use them frequently, having a button is better.
Recommendation: add the Thresholds and Issues button to the Projects toolbar.
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