Open a Primavera P6 XER file online
An XER file is the text export Primavera P6 Professional and P6 EPPM write for a project or a set of projects. Contractors send them with every schedule update. You do not need a P6 licence to read one: DeltaSys opens XER files in the browser with their logic, calendars, resources, codes and progress, and calculates the critical path.
What is in an XER file
An XER is a tab-separated text file made of tables, each introduced by a table name and its column names. The tables mirror P6's database: projects, the WBS, activities (tasks), relationships with their types and lags, calendars, resources and their rates, resource assignments, expenses, activity codes and their values, steps, the OBS, cost accounts and user-defined fields. Because it is plain text, an XER can be read without P6, but the dates in it are only meaningful once the network is calculated with the right calendars.
How to export an XER from P6
In P6 Professional, open the project (or select several), choose File, Export, Primavera PM (XER), pick the projects and save. In P6 EPPM the export is under the project's Export action in the web client. Exporting several projects together keeps the relationships between them.
How to open it in DeltaSys
- Open the Planner in a browser (Edge, Chrome, Firefox or Safari).
- Choose Open and pick the .xer file, or drop it on the window. A multi-project XER adds every project in it.
- The schedule is calculated straight away: the Gantt chart, the critical path, float, the resources and their histogram, codes, steps and progress are ready to read. A progressed project's P6 planned dates become its baseline, so earned value works from the start.
Nothing needs installing, and the file stays in your browser unless you save it to a cloud workspace.
What to check in a schedule you receive
- Open ends: activities without a predecessor or a successor other than the start and finish.
- Hard constraints and negative float, which hide the true critical path.
- Out-of-sequence progress and actual dates after the data date.
- Long lags and leads, very long durations and missing resources.
DeltaSys reports these in its schedule quality checks, the same kinds of tests recognised schedule assessment checklists use.
Questions
Can I edit the schedule and send it back as XER?
Yes. Changes are made in DeltaSys and the project is written back to XER, readable by P6, with its activities, logic, calendars, resources and progress.
What about P6 baselines?
An XER does not carry baseline projects unless they were exported too. For a progressed project DeltaSys uses the planned dates in the file as the baseline, which is what P6 measures earned value against when no baseline is assigned.
Does it read Microsoft Project files too?
Yes, as Project XML. See the Microsoft Project guide.
Related: a Primavera P6 alternative for owners · the critical path method.
Primavera and P6 are trademarks of Oracle Corporation; Microsoft Project is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation; PMBOK is a trademark of the Project Management Institute; AACE is a trademark of AACE International; Last Planner is a registered trademark of the Lean Construction Institute. DeltaSys is not affiliated with or endorsed by them. Standards are described in our own words; see the publications themselves for their text.