P6 Report Editor Tutorial - Part 1 - Basic Cell Editing

[Music] [Music] until [Music] hi this is Dan stamina swith TEPCO and I'm one of TEPCO's p6 trainers and implementation specialists and today we're going to talk about the p6 report editor this is going to be a multi-part video so watch out for future videos but today's video is only going to focus on basic cell editing before we get started I also want to mention that our p6 Advanced Course here at TEPCO contains a module on the p6 report editor so if you want some in-depth training on it you can go to WWF geo us and look at our training schedule it is the advanced course so you'll want to look for that one and it's offered both days and nights so I'm in p6 and I'm going to be using a turnaround example file that we have for the oil and gas industry although what you'll learn in this session can apply to basically any project plan the first thing I want to show you is that when version 8 came out they changed the way the toolbars work and we want to show the report editing toolbar so you want to right-click on any toolbar and you want to turn on the option for reports which is found right here that's going to add a toolbar by default should show up in the upper left and we will be utilizing that in the session now in the reports toolbar there's going to be a little drop-down arrow on the right hand side go ahead and click that and then there's an option to add or remove buttons and go ahead and turn on the report groups button and the batch reports that will ensure that every button in the toolbar is turned on you'll notice that a majority of the tool buttons in that toolbar are not active at the moment that's because you have to be in the reports window so if I click on the reports button over here on the left now you'll see that some of them become active and when I click on a specific report you'll see that they all become active I'm going to go back to the activities view and in here I have a project open and I have it grouped by WB s only WB s and I've added the activity ID activity name and activity status columns what I'm going to do is click on the wizard button right here you can also get here by going to the Tools menu tools drop down and go to report wizard and you'll notice if you haven't used this before usually if you create a new report in the reports window it only gives you the option for new report but because I went there while I was looking in the activity's view I have this option to use the current screen so we're going to go ahead and select use current screen to get a new report built now this session is about using the report editor you may be wondering why am I going into the report wizard I always build the structure of the report first before going to the report editor you can open the report editor and start with a completely blank page and build your report from scratch however I don't really recommend that because you can use the report wizard to do some of the work for you or you could copy an existing report which has most of the data components that you want and use that for your new report so we're going to go through the wizard just to get the structure built and then we'll get into the report editor and I'll show you how to do some modifications here I'm going to click Next I really don't have to do anything here because it's going to be using the current screen but there is one thing in the report wizard here that I will show you that needs to be changed the subject areas are fine if I actually click on the columns button here on the next screen you'll see that I've got the activity ID activity name and activity status that's what I asked for I could put a filter on right now if I wanted to if I had an activities view filter on it would have applied so that filter would have shown up in here if I had a filter applied click on the group and sort and you can see that were grouped and sorted by WBS and this looks like our typical activities view group and sort window however there is an extra field here show totals what this does is it automatically defaults to showing totals on the bottom this is going to subtotal any grouping band that you have and basically what it does is it adds in extra line items and we may not want that so we're going to go ahead we'll switch it to none for this particular report that's their really the only change you want to make and I may have switched it to top because maybe I want my summary bands to roll the data up but in this example we'll switch it to none and as you're going through the wizard like I said this is probably the only change that you would need to focus on if you're using an existing view or layout and click OK next and we'll call this example number one and next and what we're on the report real quick just so you can see what it looks like and that's how it's going to look in its native format and this is what we're going to work with when we get into the report editor and we'll hit next again and we're going to click the Save report button and it's letting us know it was saved as example zero 1 and click finish now we're going to go to the reports view so this button right here the report that you create will save into the report group that you were last clicked in so if you hadn't been in to the reports view since you logged into p6 it typically saves in the first report group in other words you may have to go looking for it to open the report in the editor there's a few ways you can do this you can right-click on it and click the modify button or up in the toolbar there is a modify tool button which is this one right here so go ahead and click that if you built a report with a wizard you're going to get a warning up front that if you modify it in the report editor if you go back and use the wizard against it all the modifications that you did are going to be lost so the rule is is once you go in to the modifier or the editor do not ever go back to the wizard on it because it's going to undo anything that you do in the report editor so we'll go ahead and click YES on this that's what the report looks like in its native format and this is what the wizard had set up for us here's a screenshot of the same type of report just so you can get an idea of how the fields map over to the actual print review of the reports you can see we have the report title at the top and then you'll see we have a WBS header and the activity ID activity name and activity status headers which are shown here and then down here where you have the data sources so this is activities by WBS which means we're grouping the activities by the WBS and then the blue area here is the actual activities themselves so you can see based on the arrows drawn on the screen how the fields relate to the print preview of the report back to the report editor I'm going to go through a few things in here you should probably know I'm not going to go into detail on them and they will be covered in future videos that I put out but there are a few basics that you need to understand before we get moving on with editing cells first of all at the top left here are a bunch of tool buttons the first one creates a new report so what that's going to do is if I were to click that it's going to wipe out the current report and make a blank page where you can start from scratch I mentioned earlier that I don't typically do that I usually start by using a layout or using the report wizard to get going at first the next one this green button is to add a data source that tells p6 which tables you want to loop through or go through to pull data back if you've used the report wizard much you will notice the first part of the wizard asks for a subject area the subject area is the same thing as a data source next is a row we have to add rows in order to add cells so rows are necessary before we can even have the cells and I'll talk about that a little bit more in a few minutes this one adds cells so this is where you actually add what cell you want to put into the report and then you can identify what data it's supposed to return for you this one here adds an image I don't use it very often because there's not a lot of control around the size and so forth of putting images but you can put background images and things like that in here I have inserted image cells where it would actually bring back a graph from an excel file that I have stored off onto another share drive or onto my C Drive but that's not very common for me to do this adds a line cell so if we add a row and we want to just run a line across the report to kind of break up some data elements we can add a line and we'll be discussing that a little later as well here's a print preview the next one is the properties window and I'm going to show that to you in a minute and the next item here is the wizard so you can actually trigger the wizard to run against this report again if you wanted to change data components by using the wizard like I said you don't want to go into the wizard if you've already kind of built out this report and made some edits to it now I want to take your attention down to the lower right corner you have a Help button a cancel button and an OK button it's important to understand that there is not a Save button inside the report editor you have to click OK to save it when you click OK it's going to close the report so I'll go ahead and do that that will save the report and you want to do that periodically because there are times when you're working in the report editor things might lock up on you so click OK quite a bit and then just right click on it again and go back to modify and start where you were the other thing is is if you make some changes or maybe you damaged the report and you don't want to save it just hit the cancel button in the lower-right that will ensure that it cancels it it does not save it and you can go reopen it again and take off on the last version there's not an undo button so hitting cancel is really your undo you have to back out of it that's why you want to save it quite a bit because if you do 10 minutes worth of work inside a report and then you find out you have to cancel it now you may have just lost 10 minutes worth of your edits so cancel and ok are very important buttons and should be used frequently now we're going to go into editing cells this may be all that you want to learn we will have future videos out for more detailed information on using the report editor including adding data sources and some more advanced concepts but this video the remainder of it may be the only functionality that you need to utilize in order to edit cells or any data element in here we need to open the properties window that's this button right here but be aware that you can double click anywhere in the report and it will open it as well so I'm going to double-click just on this green data source and when it opens the properties window you'll see some tabs at the top here because I double clicked on the data source the source tab showed up watch what happens when I click on a cell it automatically jumps over to the cell tab if I had a blank row in here which I do at the top or towards the top I'll click here and you'll see that it jumps over to the row and then there is also the farthest tab on the left is general report information so if I click on there this is where you can edit the title you can put in a background image do some page setup and this is also where if you're doing time distributed data where you could set your time scale options I'll just open that up real quick so you can see that but time scale start what the data interval is going to be if you're using a shift calendar and time scale finish and duration so very similar to how we set up our time scales when we're working in say the activities view or the resource assignments view you notice when I hit cancel the report editor has disappeared in the background it will come back when I close the properties window so you will have to click on the red X at the top here and once it comes back just double click somewhere again and reopen the properties window also in the properties window in the report tab the title if I change it here it does not change it in the reports window list so it currently has named example dash zero one it's which is what I saved it as and that's what it displays as inside the reports list if I were to cancel or click OK and get out of the report editor but if I do change it here it no longer is linked to the reports list and vice-versa so keep that in mind so if you want to change the title to this report maybe putting a report numbering scheme on the front of it which I like to do you may want to copy this field here and you can just highlight it after you get done editing it press ctrl C on your keyboard and then close out and then go paste the new title in to the reports list as well the other thing here is the viewing options you'll notice that the width down here is ten point six basically when we ran the wizard on this the wizard decided how wide our report was going to be but we usually want to build our reports around what our paper sizes are going to be so you'll want to know in advance are you running it in portrait or landscape are you doing it in u.s. letter size or a4 size maybe a different size if you're in Europe possibly and you want to set this width to whatever you intend on printing it to be and I'm going to go ahead and do this I'm going to change it to 8.5 first watch what happens to the canvas in the background it shrinks it up I actually don't want to do that I'm going to make this one 11 wide so it's going to be more of a landscape report so I punch in 11 there and click enter and now it stretches it back out so just be aware you usually want to set up your canvas size to match whatever you're going to be printing to because it'll make a little more sense and the width of the report here will reflect what the paper size is that you intend on going to now regarding cells a cell can be identified because you'll see a little blue letter in the top right hand corner of every cell here you'll see one with a C in it that indicates that it's a custom text cell up here we have one with a V in it that's a variable cell so it's pulling back variable data which could be things like a date or the data date the report title and so forth and the data cells have a DM so those are the ones that are actually pulling back data from the data tables data cells exist underneath or within data sources you'll see here we have a data source which is activities by WBS and then we have a cell which says WBS name that's actually the grouping band for WBS so if we do a print preview that's the WBS grouping bands right here that it's pulling back and then the next data source our activities so once it sets up the groupings for the WBS bands then it actually brings back the activities so that's these here you can add more data sources that's going to be covered in future videos but I'll just give you one example right here I could add a data source underneath activities it comes in as orange at first but I have to tell it what I want it to loop through so I hit this drop-down and I can say loop through activity resource assignments and then I would have to add a row and some cells here and what that would do is it would cause the activities to all be listed underneath each WBS element but then it would show underneath each activity the resources that are assigned to it and there's multiple data sources that you can add underneath activities so if I was using activity steps or expenses I could put in predecessors or successors it's the kind of things that you would find in the activity's detailed tabs if you were working in the activities view I need to remove this data source so I could simply hit cancel but I'm going to lose my other changes that I made including the page size or the canvas size that we had set out to 11 inches previously I can click on the data source here which is now yellow but if I hit the delete button on my keyboard or I right-click and say delete it doesn't allow me to delete it I need to select the entire data source all of the yellow and there's only one way to do that that's to hit escape on your keyboard while your clicked inside it so I click anywhere inside the yellow whether it's the data source header area detail area or the footer area and I hit escape on my keyboard when I hit escape you can barely see it but it actually backed out or selected the entire data source now I can press delete on my keyboard and it'll ask me if I'm sure that I want to delete that component and I can say yes and it goes away now you'll notice I have a lot of space here if I want to tighten that up the quickest way to do it is to right-click and select auto arrange and that I use frequently it just helps clean things up every once in a while if things have spread out I can right click and say auto arrange and it'll tighten everything back up in a minute I'll be showing you how to use the Escape key to delete rows so it comes in handy and other areas for example I can click on the cell right here and if I hit escape on my keyboard it steps backwards and it actually selects the row that the cells reside in so now if I hit delete I would actually be deleting the entire row including the cells inside of it if I hit escape again it jumps back again but it only grabs the detail area of the next data source so I have to hit escape again now it highlights the entire data source if I hit delete right now the data source the blue is going to go away along with the row and the cells inside of it if I hit escape again it jumps back again now I've selected the detail area of the green data source or the data source where the activities are grouped by WBS if I hit escape one more time I selected the entire green data source if I hit delete right now I'm going to delete the green data source along with everything that resides in it which includes the WVS name it also includes the activities data source plus the row and the activity ID activity name and activity status inside there so basically I'm going to delete everything if I were to hit the delete button on my keyboard right now for the remainder of the session we're going to clean up this report and make it look better there's quite a few things we can do to make it look much more professional first of all any report that you create is going to have this field up here called notes I'm going to click OK and I'm going to go back to the reports view and I'm going to right click and I'm going to say run and I'll say run report this field down here is the notes field and if I type anything in there and then do a print preview it is going to show those at the top of the report I don't ever use this so if you do use it you should not remove this field but I'm going to remove the field so we're going to right click go back to modify this is wasting space now that is a cell I can hit delete right now and delete the entire cell but the row that the cell resides in is still going to stay there so if I hit delete it's going to ask me if I want to delete this report component I say yes but you'll notice that the row is still there that's still going to waste space at the top for me so I actually want to get rid of the row as well but I'm going to do that over and show you what I normally do and I'm going to say no I don't want to save the changes I will reopen the report when I click on the notes cell I'm going to hit escape on my keyboard remember that jumps back so it's going to jump back and grab the row behind the cell because I actually don't have any room to click the row itself down here I do and I'll show you that next so right now I have the row selected I'm going to press delete on my keyboard and yes now that one goes away this next one is just a blank row that's wasting space on my header as well so I'm going to delete that now on these I don't really need the WBS here because it's pretty much implied anybody that's looking at the report probably knows that it's grouped by the WBS sometimes I will put in an indicator at the top here as to what my grouping bands are but for this case we're going to remove this and save some more space so we're going to go ahead and now we can just click the row because we can get at it the cell isn't fully covering the row if I actually grab the edge of the cell and stretched it over it would cover the whole row and I wouldn't be able to get at it so we'll go ahead and move that back I click the entire row and the WBS is going to go away now remember that's just the WBS header so if I print preview you'll notice that it's not showing the letters WBS up here anymore whereas previously it was and you can see that we've really tightened up the header space here next we're going to talk about how to kind of clean up the cells or maybe change the size of the columns in order to accommodate the data a little bit better first of all if you click on a cell you can click and drag it right or left typically there is one caveat to that and that's if I double click here and I open up the properties window underneath the cell tab there is an align cell drop down here and you can either align it to Center left right or none by default when you create a rapport with the wizard they are all aligned with none so you can grab them and move them around they're basically floating now what I like to do is I will click on say the activity ID header up here and I'm going to align the cell on that to the left what that does is it pushes the cell as far left as it can now if I click on activity name and I say a line cell to the left it goes as far left as it can before it bumps into the next left aligned cell now if the activity ID was not aligned left and it was still floating or set to none the activity name would have actually overridden that and it would have shoved over the top of it or underneath it so be aware that that can happen what I usually like to do is I like to figure out which cells do I want pushed to the left and which ones do I want pushed to the right because what happens is when the report editor builds a report it leaves a little bit of space in between the cells if you're using a lot of columns that can be a lot of space you could actually have another column or two worth of real estate there to work with so usually what I do is I figure out which columns are going to be pushed to the left so activity ID we've already identified it and pushed it to the left by using the align cell next I'm going to go to activity status and I'm going to push this one to the right so I'm going to go align cell right that one pushes it all the way over to the right now I'm going to go in and fill in the space I could grab the edge of activity name and I could drag it over you can also manually change the width by changing the width right here but if I really just want everything to be clean and to fill in all the space I can click on activity name and I can tell it to align the cell to Center that's going to utilize whatever space it has available the other thing is is if I copy this cell and you can copy cells and then I paste it right where it's at it's going to insert another cell and when it does that the cell is actually aligned right still but the activity names since that one was aligned to Center it compensated for the insert so the activity name shortened up in order to fit the new cell in there and then of course once I get that in there I could say what the header title is supposed to be like finish date possibly and if I remove the cell I just have to click on it press delete on my keyboard say yes and you'll notice that the activity name REE compensated now since the cell has been taken out the activity name has kind of stretched out to fill in that space again anything I do to the header cells I need to do to the corresponding data cells otherwise they'll be out of alignment you can start to see here activity ID activity name my activity status is not in alignment so I have to do the exact same thing down to the corresponding data cells so I'm going to click on activity ID down here align cell left I'm going to click activity status align cell right and I can see that activity name may be overlapped with my idea a little bit so I'm going to move that over a little bit before I actually Center it just to make sure it doesn't accidentally overlap the activity ID and we'll go align cell Center by the way whatever so you choose to align Center the one that you want to use to flex or expand or contract to come safe for space either by adding a new cell or by removing a cell this is a cell that you want to expand and contract set that one to Center last make sure that you set your other cells to left or right first so that they push to the left or right and always Center the field that you decide you want to be flexible set that one to Center last once I've aligned the cells Center left or right the next thing I need to look at is the width of the cells now if I click on the activity ID column header and I look at the width that says 1.39 over here if I click on activity ID the data cell you'll notice that that says 1.59 so the fields are actually still a little bit out of sync because this cell is a little bit larger than its corresponding header so what I need to do is make sure that they're running at the same width activity IDs I usually run at about 1.2 so what I do is I click on both of them first I'll click on the header I come down here to the width and I'm going to type in 1.2 and I'm going to hit enter by the way when I hit enter watch what happens to the activity name field next to it it compensates for it so I've shortened cell up the cell that is centered which is the activity name that one will expand so we go down to the activity ID data cell also make that 1.2 enter on my keyboard now everything is in alignment and I usually try to check all of the cells to make sure that they're the same but usually the one on the left the activity ID they tend to come in with different widths on them due to how the wizard created them in the first place I'm going to do a quick print preview so we can see where we're at on it and then I'm going to click OK to close it to ensure that it saves and then I'll reopen it so print preview so so far we have cleaned up the top we have also realigned the headers and we've realigned the activity data down below here the next thing I want to show you when we come back in is the activity ID here how its indented I can show you a way to resolve that if you don't like having the ID indented and you'll notice that when it is indented it is actually eating up the space we set it up to be a 1.2 inch width but because it's putting an indent on it it's eating up some space at the front that on the left side of the cell which could actually cause your activity IDs the tail land on the right hand side to be hidden so you want to make sure that that doesn't happen and we'll go ahead and close print preview and I'm going to click OK and then right click and click modify again now regarding the activity ID when I double click on it which is going to open my properties window and take me to the cell tab down at the bottom there is a check box here for indents cell some of the cells are indented some of them are not so I'm going to go ahead and turn that off and I'll show you what the results are by going to print preview again now it's actually pushed all of my IDs out to the left so it's really your preference if you do like them indented that's great just be aware that you're eating up more space so if you're trying to fit more data inside a row or a line item there you may want to actually outdent those or take the indent off so that you are saving some more space next let's format the WVS grouping bands so the cell name here WBS name that's what we're going to be working with I'm going to double click it but before I do this I want to take us over to the data source so I'm going to click on the green because that's the WBS data source to group the activities by WBS and here we have loop through so that's identifying what we're looping through what we're going to group by you also have page break options and then you have some options here for organizing hierarchically height if empty and so forth so this is very much like the group and sort that we work with when we're in the activities view I'm going to take off the organized hierarchically because I don't want my WBS in this particular report to be organized hierarchically in other words indented so if I look at it now you'll see that the WB SS are all out dented and not indented hierarchically you may not like that it's your preference I tend to do that because of what I'm about to do next I'm going to color and put a border around this cell first of all this cell is not filling the entire page there's a bunch of blank space over on the right-hand side I'll show you what it looks like first I'm going to put borders on it so I click on the cell and I'm going to come down to this borders button I'm going to put a left border right border top border and bottom border on all the way around now we'll print preview and that's what that looks like but you'll see right here that it's not filling in the entire page so we'll fix that next and that's basically by going to the cell tab and telling it to align the cell to Center which is going to take that one cell and fill in the entire space print preview again and this is why I'm not going to put the hierarchical on is because I really don't want to see the parent elements in there I just want this to be straightforward you'll see as I scroll down that it gets a little messy here and there so I'm going to go ahead double click the green again which will bring me to the data source tab and I'm going to make it so that's not hierarchical I'm also going to turn on hide if empty and when I turned on the height of empty that took the parent elements out so the hierarchical upper up the level parents have been removed because I turn on the height of empty so now that looks a little bit more clean and eventually when I run this report I'll put a filter on it so I'm probably only wanting to see a specific job inside this project file next I want to color the cell so I'm just going to click on the WBS name again it's going to bring me to the cell tab the color is controlled right here there's a color button click on this button right here and it will open up a palette of colors for you go ahead and select green for this one print preview and that's what it looks like now while we're here I want to point out a little bit of a problem that kind of varies depending on which version of p6 you're using I'm currently using 16.2 with service pack 6 for this video notice how this is actually the WVS code but I wanted the WBS name if I double-click on here it says WBS name and even if I switch it to code and then switch it back it still won't correct itself and like I mentioned the different versions seem to act differently around this unfortunately what I would have to do to fix this is I would have to run the wizard against it and we'll go use current screen and I'd have to come into group and sort and the mistake I made here was when I initially came through the wizard and at the group and sort window ID code was on instead of name and description now if I continue through the wizard here I'm going to lose all my formatting and I'm going to have to start over so I'm just going to live with the WBS code for now but I wanted to make that point in case you run into this it could trigger you to actually restart the wizard and start it all over set the properties window open here and I just want to do a quick review of all of the fields inside the cell tab first one is the cell type I mention that in each one of the cells you'll see a little blue letter in the top right hand corner that's controlled by this so we have four types of data we have custom text field data field titles and variables field titles actually bring back the column titles from the database and usually I use custom text because I want to modify them or just type the titles in manually so field title is one that I don't use very often variable brings back things like the current date the data day to me the project name and so forth and I'll be covering those in future videos and mainly what we're working with now is field data once you get the cell type selected there's a Cell object this is where you can actually go in and change the table that p6 is pointed to now the source tab actually controls the the source that it's pulling from but you can actually do some assignments here you can change the parameters here which opens up the door to some other things and I don't want to go into details on this because that could take an entire new video but I just wanted to point that out it came over as WBS because that's what we had selected as our subject area in a future video I will describe how you can make changes to that to make some cell modifications that you actually cannot do in the activities view there are certain things you can do in the report editor that you can't do anywhere else in p6 the cell field is the actual column or data field that you want to use so these pretty much match what you would see in your activities view in this case depending on the subject area so if we had used a data source or a subject area of activity resource assignments these fields would be different but this is basically the area where you select what you want in the field so this is the primary one that you would change or modify for new reports align the cell center so we can align the cell left right or center or you can tell it none if you set it to none it's just going to be a floating cell and you can actually click and drag it and move it around I like to shuffle things to the left or to the right and then Center one of the cells to fill in the space things tend to turn out cleaner that way if I left everything as none and I tried to manually move things to the positions that I want I'd have to watch the ruler up on top and sometimes your column titles can get quite out of sync with the data below so you want to be careful with how you're handling this text alignment so do I want the text left or right so if I just click on one here this is just like Excel so I could write justify the text which would move it over to the right of the cell I could Center it and in a lot of cases I do Center some of the fields for that one will leave it as left justified font style we have body font 1 we have a bunch of fonts in here that are already pre-made body font 1 body font 2 I use those a lot the difference between those two in particular is just said body font 2 is bolded but it's actually the same font but anytime I want to change a font I'll go ahead and do that on WBS name here I usually come in and go to customize and then click on this button here that says custom font now I can do a lot of different things with that font so I could increase the font size and I could change the color of it and that's what that would look like not very pretty but we'll leave it for now now down below here timescale type if you are using time distributed data doing a spreadsheet the cells that can be time distributed if you select one of them this will become active and I'll be making another video specifically on time distributed data but just be aware if it is a cell that can be time distributed you can change that here whether you want it to be the period total or the intervals the same types of things that you would go through if you had selected time distributed data in the wizard format cell text this one is interesting let's say that you're building a report and your user preferences are not showing any of the labels for hours or days but if you build this report and the format cell text checkbox is turned on if someone else runs the report it will look at their user preferences and it will put in the HS or the DS maybe you don't want to do that and you want to make sure that that can never happen to the report especially if you're building a report that you intend on pushing to excel as an ASCII text file you wouldn't want anybody to run the report and have the h's or the DS on because that will cause Excel to read them as text cells rather than number cells so if you want to make sure that there is no formatting allowed on a cell you can take this check box off of course this is WBS name so there's not really anything there that would be affected anyway now regarding indents cell we had talked about that earlier you can indent cells and when you use the wizard they will indent automatically that'll also happen if you set up multiple grouping bands in the group and sort window because it will indent the second third and fourth grouping bands and so on so you can tell p6 if you want the cell indented or not and the difference is this now they're indented but I like to save real estate unless it makes sense and depending on who I'm running the report for I usually won't indent cells but sometimes it's you need to do that just to make it clean so that if they're looking at a large amount of data it's a little cleaner to look at other thing is is borders I'm going to go ahead and put some borders around all of these activities now the activity ID is what I'm selected on right now I'm going to put a left border top and bottom for activity name and you have to do these one by one you can't select a bunch of cells and put borders on all of them at the same time like you could in a tool like Excel I'm going to put a top and bottom here and then on activity status I'm going to put a top bottom and right border and if we look at that now I actually have all my activities grouped together I probably wouldn't do that in this sort of report but I'm going to give you an example of another report here in a few minutes where I would do this filters I don't usually use filters on cells it's a little difficult to understand them but basically you can tell it if it's saying activity code you can tell it to only show the cell value if it is equal to one of the codes in the system sometimes you can go in here thinking that you're putting on a filter and it doesn't actually do anything so it's a little more subtle I've never really found a reason to use a filter in this view you're filtering for the entire report is done in the source tab so you'd want to click on usually the most outer source and you click on edit filter and this would be the same type of filter that you would have in your activities for you and HTML links you can put HTML links into cells in here the only thing is is that we usually print reports to hard copies so hot links really aren't going to matter I believe the intent here was that if you were running the report out to HTML you could hot link some of the cells to different documents or so forth I've never really used that either but it is there you could go ahead and try that out if you feel like you have a need for it before we finish up this video I'm going to show you a bit of a more elaborate report I have a turnaround schedule open a refinery turnaround schedule and I want to create a report that is a job scope report so the intent will be that we can put a filter on this report and run a scope for one of the particular WBS elements this could be useful for job locks or just to let the team know what's involved with with doing the job so I ran it in the wizard first and I'm going to show you what that looks like in the editor this report was built in the wizard I grouped it by project and then by an activity code called PA equipment type and then the WBS element that's where the job resides I've also grouped after that by what's called ta phase so it's a turnaround phase I'm going to filter for the execution phase only and then I'm going to list the activities and underneath each activity I'm going to have the resource assignments I'm going to have predecessors I've actually added successors to the final report as well but for when I ran the wizard I only selected predecessors and project expenses so if you're doing cost in p6 and you put an expense item on that particular job or activity it would show up here I'm going to take a screenshot of this just so we can reference it later and you can see that the grouping bands have not spread across the entire report so there's a lot of things that we need to fix here we have a lot of open space up here being utilized this really isn't necessary this is going to land at the top of every page so this is really a waste of space right here so we're going to clean that up we need to take the column headers and move them left and right spread amount resize them and along with the column header resizing and moving around we have to resize the activity IDs the activity name the information down under the activity here because that needs to match whatever we do to the column headers and down under the sub data sources so the activity resource assignments the predecessors and expenses each one of those has columns and some data fields in them as well so we have to adjust those move them around to make it look cleaner when we get to the final report as well I want to note that I've added another data source which is going to be a WBS notebook topic this is to show any information inside an assigned WBS notebook item which is going to be used that towards the top of the report to give any additional text information or a narrative on what the scope and the description of the job will be I'm going to run this report in its native formats you can see what it looks like by just using a wizard and you can see that's kind of sloppy so the whole intent of going into the editor is to clean this up and make it presentable I also want to point out at the top this WBS element where it says III 21 I am pulling in the summary data for that like the original duration budgeted labor units and so forth but I really only want the a completion total cost so in the final report I've cleaned these cells out basically the concept is is that they don't need that information at a summary level but they do want to see what the total cost is going to be okay I'm going to close this report and we'll go and open the final one and I'm going to split my screen here so you can kind of see the original one versus the modified final version so you can see at the top of the report I have cleaned out I've deleted all of the elements up there all of the rows that were unnecessary you can see that my activities by project grouping that I've changed the color I've done that to all of the grouping bands this element right here is the notebook item and this is the WBS notebook item I mentioned I added this data source afterwards because the wizard would not allow me to do it with the type of subject area that I had selected in the wizard and I've cleaned up the headers and the activity information I've also added some headers for resource assignments the relationships and also a little lower one for expense items and I've cleaned up each of these data elements so I've moved the column data around shuffled it left or right and centered it and so forth in order to make it a bit more presentable so let's print preview this one and here's what that looks like I did put in a logo for TEPCO on the top here and this is all done in the header area of the report editor and that will be discussed in more detail in a future video I put in generated by and this actually draws in the username I'm logged in as admin right now but in your environment if you had usernames in there you could have them displayed at the top right of the report I find that very useful because if someone comes up to me and says hey Dan can you run this report for me if I've never seen it before but it has a user name at the top for the person that did last run it I can go talk to them and get some information on the report find out where it's at also put the run date and time like I said we've cleaned up and moved around the headers I made sure that my activity information which is right down here matched it so when you move things left I like I move the activity ID the cell to push to the left I moved all the other cells to push to the right and then I use the activity name as the centering one so that's the one that flexes to fill in any space here's the header band that I added for resource assignments and then here's the resource assignment information I change the names of these headers to make more sense for this particular industry and you can see the resources here along with the crew size durations and total hours next we have the relationships so I brought in the relationships I did add a little cell here just to indent them I thought that looked a bit cleaner but these are the predecessors here and I've included information on the duration if there's any lag on the relationship and if it's a driving relationship so any type of other column data that you wanted to put in there for relationships you certainly could and the same thing for successors and on this particular activity for installing the blinds I did enter a mock expense item for exchange of lines I didn't put a cost on it if you have an expense item it will show up I colored it blue to draw some attention to it if an expense item shows up because not all activities have expense items so I scroll down here I do have another one right here that does have a cost on it I mentioned also that I added the data source for the WVS notebook item and that's right here so at the top we have the job or the WBS which is going to be this exchanger here's an overall scope description for it so I just mocked up some text to put in there for the time being but if you had a job letter maybe some data from si P or something like that that you wanted to paste in there you certainly could it's also grouped by phase so anything underneath this grouping band is part of the turnaround execution phase and you'll also notice that this particular code for safety I colored it red so whenever it shows up because the safety code is not on every activity so when it does show up it is red just to draw some more attention to it so we initially started with the report in the wizard and this is what the wizard gave us and we ended up with this report when we went into the editor and keep in mind probably 90% of the work getting the report to look like this had to do with moving cells around the stuff that we've been talking about during this video so that's most of the work adding the data source we'll be talking about that in a future video and a few other tips and tricks including adjusting the headers and footers and so forth just keep in mind if you can work with the cells and moving the cells around and coloring them putting borders on them positioning them and resizing them that may be all you need to make your reports look brilliant thanks for watching today if you need any cost or schedule support or implementation support or training please go to WWF go us

Channel: TEPCOSolutions

Views: 4,761

Rating: 4.9148936 out of 5

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Id: HF3-kevbnBk

Length: 51min 8sec (3068 seconds)

Published: Tue May 02 2017