Assign Resources to Oracle Primavera P6 Schedule using Excel Import

Assigning Resources to Oracle Primavera P6 time schedule could be very time consuming task without the help of MS Excel. In this article i will explain a step by step how you could save lot of working hours by using excel import.

1- Prepare Resource Assignment in Excel:

First step in Assign Resources to Oracle Primavera P6 is to prepare an excel sheet which contains the Activity ID, Resource Name, and Resource Units. Mainly this sheet should be a result of what called cost loading sheet (you can learn how to do cost loading by studding this Oracle Primavera P6 Course) However for this exercise i am going to use very simple sheet to explain the general idea.

Our Resource Loading Table in the picture below should only contains 3 columns:

1- Activity Id: Is your activity Id as exists in Primavera p6

2- Resource Id: is the resource ID you want to assign for this activity, You can find the resource Id from enterprise—resources or as per my explanation below.

3- Budget units: is the number of hours if you are assigning labor resource or the cost if you are assigning cost.

2- Assign one activity with all resources in oracle primavera p6:

Now you need to assign one activity only in your p6 schedule with all the resources you have as per the following:

The reason i assigned all the resources to one activity is to get the proper resource assignment excel sheet for this project and to have the resources ID which i can fill in the resource loading sheet we created in the 1st step.

3- Export the resource assignment sheet from oracle primavera p6:

Now from File—Export—Spreadsheet—Resource assignment and be sure to select the following columns:

4- Edit the resource assign sheet in excel:

The exported file will contain one activity and three resourced assigned to it. Now we will Type the letter d in the Delete This Row column so when we import the sheet the resource assignment we made will be deleted.

After the row 5 we can add our resource assignment for all the project activities by adding activity ID, copy past Not Started , type the resource ID and target qty. See the following example:

Now we need to convert the numbers in target_qty column to text so oracle Primavera P6 will understand it when we import. See the following photo.

Text to column step 1:

Text to column step 2:

Text to column step 3:

Text to column step 4:

5- Import the resource assign sheet to primavera p6:

From File—import—spreadsheet—and select the sheet to be imported to your project. You will find after the import that all the activities are assigned with resources and resource units s well.

Conclusion:

Importing data from Excel to Primavera P6 saves 100’s of working hours. However, this article shows only a very basic concept of using Excel power in Planning. If you are interested in Advanced techniques i would advise you with Advanced Planning using Primavera P6 course