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