Weekly progress report

Richu,

good luck. No really. Tabular reports in P3 are more frustrating than explaining why you need a 3,000 euro mountain bike to your wife. It’s not that it’s really so complex or even especially powerful, only that it doesn’t really follow the norms established by stuff like access and excel and, like a lot of P3 gives only the slightest lipservice to usability. Oh, and it’s, what, 20 years old.

I am also self taught in P3 (as I suspect a lot of people here are). I had the gerat fortune to spend a year on a project with a planner who was very knowledgable in the esoteric workings of the vintage automobile that is P3 and I now have a basic knowledge of how to write reports in it. I wouldn’t know where to start explaining it over the internet though.

If anyone knows a good written guide to the tabular report writer in P3, I’d be very interested to hear it (and get a copy).

The best advice I can offer is either find a mentor in your office who can sit with you and take you through it or click Tools > Tabular reports > Report Writer... and fiddle through the standard reports in there until you can figure out how it works. If you aer familiar with Access queries, updates and crosstabs, I rekon you’ll work it out relatively quickly. While it doesn’t follow the same norms, the underlying fundamentals are the same ... filter, select, manipulate, display

how about exporting this weeks and the previous weeks (as a Target 1) into excel and using formulas in excel to show how much was performed that week, ect. I can’t think of a good way to show amount planned to be performed this week especially when you consider some activites have float on them and don’t need to be done this week. does that help?

and James if you ever can adequately explain how get that bike please let me know as I have been trying to upgrade my road bike for years

I bought one while on business then apologised when I got home. Didn’t work, but I do have the bike...

Export to Excel is a decent idea. Also, once you reach the end of the second reporting cycle you will have the results of the previous one to benchmark against in Excel already so you can easily run formulae against them.

Even if you can get the report writer to do what you want, the output tends to be in a text file that is even more difficult to manipulate into something you can calculate against than it was to produce in the first place.

James,

Our office does not have any planning department or standard procedure or any one who can help me. Just because client has instructed to submitt in P3 , we are obliging to clients demand.

Richu

Richu

if you export the P3 data to .DBF then open in P3 you will be submitting P3 data. Directly generated P3 reports are very 70s, excel will allow you to manipulate and present the data much better.

If you are unfamiliar with the export function;

*click* Tools>Project Utilities>Export...

Select the export "EX2 - Export Data File - Dbase - Schedule Data". Look at the tabs in teh box, you can specify where the file will be saved to and a filter so you don’t have to export everything if you don’t want to.

Run the export than open the resulting DBF file in Excel. You will find that your activity data has been tabulated under headings like ACT (your activity ID), OD (the activity Original Duration) and ES (Early Start). Each activity gets one line in the sheet. Successor info is not exported.

Now close that and go back to your plan. Run the same export again, this time click the "all Current" button in the export dialog. This will add all the available data to the list of stuff to be exported. Again, open the DBF file in Excel and take a look, you will find a lot of data, most of it you won’t need (like 99 log fields that are most likely blank). Pick out the stuff you do need and next time, only export the fields that are needed for your report. If you need a comparison against target, you can export target data this way aswell and run formulae against it to generate the delta figures. Beware that if you export resource data you will find that activiies with more than one resource allocated to them will get multiple lines in teh resulting DBF table. One line for each resource allocated.

You can obviously bring this table into Access and write your report from there too, if you prefer.

If you really really really want to use P3 report writer, then roll your sleeves up and click Report Writer like I said before. You will have to wade through it, using the example reports as a guide (if you’re vey lucky, one may suit your needs)

Richu,

Theres one more option:

Using pervasive ODBC drivers for transferring data from P3 to excel. If u r updating your program weekly, then u dont need to export from P3 to excel. Just by clicking Refresh button, all the activities will be updated.

You can find paper on using pervasive ODBC drivers on PAUL Harris website. www.eh.com.au

Pervasive ODBC drivers can be downloaded from primavera’s FTP website.

ftp://suppsaleserver.primavera.com/odbc

Initial set-up may take hour or so, but it will make ur life at ease for further weekly reports.

Cheers,

Ravi

I don’t think you’ll get P3 report writer to do half of what you require.
All the data is in a database and is ’live data’. You will be able to show cumulative % complete only. You would have to export to Excel on a weekly basis and subtract last weeks from this weeks to see this weeks progress.
One possibility is to ’Store Period Performance’, but this is rather limited - don’t think it stores % complete.

Sorry, your client is asking for things P3 cannot do.

Gave up on tabular reports years ago. I just use the columns and filters to printout the information - no need to bugger about with Excel, DBFs and all that other stuff!
Never had any problems.

I’ve always considered that programmes are not for the planners but the project’s executers, they are the ones that need to understand the information you are giving them. Use the ’KISS’ principal - Keep It Simple Stupid’

Hi Richu

I, for one, agree that the best way to learn P3 is with a mentor. We may learn it by ourselves but it might take us some time and time the luxury that you don’t have :-)

You might have to ask your manager(s) and/or your client how they would like the report to be. As you said, all items in your list should be in the report but how you present them is another thing so that you client would appreciate/understand the use of P3 as a project management tool.