The Primavera P6 User’s Guide to Excel - How to Use Primavera P6 and Excel Together

Sep 11, 2026

The Primavera P6 User’s Guide to Excel explains how to combine Primavera P6 scheduling with Microsoft Excel to improve productivity and reporting. It presents tutorial-style chapters covering the rationale for using both tools, an Excel VLOOKUP tutorial for transferring updated project values between spreadsheets, and methods to bridge and import WBS data into Primavera P6. The guide emphasizes practical workflows for mapping data, managing WBS files centrally, and using lookup formulas efficiently to keep project progress information synchronized.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryPresentations

FormatPDF

Pages44

Reading Time15 min

AccessFree to download

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Why Primavera P6 and Excel

Chapter 2: Excel VLOOKUP Tutorial

Chapter 3: P6XL Bridge helps you manipulate P6 data in Excel

Chapter 4: How to Import WBS from Excel to Primavera P6 using the SDK

Chapter 5: Using Primavera’s .xer File Parser – Import WBS from Excel Without the SDK

THE PRIMAVERA P6 USER’S GUIDE TO EXCEL How to use these two powerful tools together to maximize your productivity and reporting. 1 Table of Contents Chapter 1: Why Primavera P6 and Excel Chapter 2: Excel VLOOKUP Tutorial Chapter 3: P6XL Bridge helps you manipulate P6 data in Excel Chapter 4: How to Import WBS from Excel to Primavera P6 using the SDK Chapter 5: Using Primavera’s .xer File Parser – Import WBS from Excel Without the SDK CHAPTER ONE Introduction: Why Primavera 6 And Excel Are Better Together Primavera P6 users are also Excel users? Why the two are better together. Excel has the ability to map out data in dashboards, utilize math and lookup functions not available in Primavera P6, and overall save you time and stress. Primavera P6, conversely, can help you manage and track your WBS files in one centralized location. IN this eBook we have packaged up some of our favorite tutorials, so you have an easy way to make use of these powerful tools. CHAPTER TWO EXCEL VLOOKUP TUTORIAL Primavera users are also Excel users. As many of you know, Microsoft Excel has many useful functions in different areas such as Financial, Date & Time, Math, Trig and so on. One of these areas is Look up & Reference. The functions in this area are dealt with lists, indexes and arrays and help us to find some special information in these listed data or other. This required information could be address of a desired cell which contains some special value, a value or action to perform a list of values, a reference specified by a text string, a relative position of an item in array that matches a specified value in a specific order and finally: a value in the leftmost column of a table and then returns a value in the same row from a column you specify. The last function is called VLOOKUP and I myself find it very useful in most of the planning activities. Sometimes when you have some spreadsheets with heaps of information in them and you need to transfer some updated information from one list into another, VLOOKUP helps you to do it fast and accurate. This list could be your export from Primavera and you can update it from a database (which most of the time can have an output in the form of a spreadsheet) using VLOOKUP and then import it in Primavera and everything is updated now, easy and quick! Let’s see how can we define and use this function in our Excel VLOOKUP tutorial. How to write a VLOOKUP formula Let’s start with a practical example. Suppose that we have a list of updated progress of some documents and we want to update their percent completes in another list which has been exported from Primavera. Here are our lists on the right. Let’s call the right table Database table and the left one Primavera table. Now we want to have percent complete for each document. So westart writing the formula in the Activity % complete column in primavera table. When you choose VLOOKUP function in Excel, you should complete the following inputs: 􀁸 Lookup_value: This is the value that is common between our arraysand we use it to find our desired value. In this example both arrays have Documents numbers in common, so we use this value as our look up value. 􀁸 Table_array: In here we should input the address of our main array that have desired information in it and in which data is retrieved. We will see how we should insert the cell address in here. 􀁸 Col_index_num: This number is the column number in our main array in which our desired data is located. You should notice that this number starts from one for the first column in the array that you have chosen in the previous section, so you should count columns to find your result column and input the number in here. In our example %Complete is located in fifth column so we should input 5 in this part. 􀁸 Range_lookup: In this part you have two logical TRUE and FALSE options and each one have different meanings in the formula. If you put TRUE the func

FAQs

Why use Primavera P6 together with Excel?

Excel supports dashboards and advanced math/lookup functions that Primavera P6 may not provide directly, while Primavera P6 centralizes and tracks WBS files. Using both reduces time and stress and improves reporting workflows.

What is VLOOKUP used for in the guide?

VLOOKUP is used to transfer updated values, such as percent completes, from one table exported to Excel back into another table tied to Primavera data. It enables fast and accurate matching of common identifiers.

How do you set the VLOOKUP inputs for an exact match?

In the formula, use the common identifier as Lookup_value, provide the main data range as Table_array, specify the result column with Col_index_num, and set Range_lookup to FALSE to require an exact match for reliability.

Sep 11, 2026

Uploaded by Caleb Sterling