What an XER file is

XER is Primavera P6's export format: a text file holding the project's tables - activities, WBS, relationships, resources, calendars - one after another. It's what P6 users send when a programme is submitted, updated or shared, because it can be imported into another P6 database.

Opened in Notepad or Excel it's a wall of tab-separated rows with codes in place of names, which is why you need something that reads the tables and puts them back together.

Open it in your browser

  1. Open Programme Studio in your browser.
  2. Drop the .xer file on the window, or choose Open a file and pick it. Older P6 files saved in Windows-1252 and newer UTF-8 ones both read correctly, and so do P6 XML exports.
  3. Browse the activities by WBS in the tree on the left, filter to the critical path or a trade, and click any activity to see what drives its dates.
  4. Switch to the network or calendar view, or print it to A4 or A3 with a title block.

There is a step-by-step video in How to review a contractor's P6 programme.

What you can see

  • Activities: ID, name, WBS, start and finish, durations, percent complete, activity codes and user-defined fields.
  • The critical path and float: rescheduled with the critical path method on each activity's own calendar, with total and free float.
  • Logic: each activity's predecessors and successors with their types and lags, drawn on the Gantt chart and the network view.
  • Calendars and progress: working weeks, holidays and exceptions, the data date, actual dates and remaining durations.
  • Schedule checks: open ends, weak logic, hard constraints and out-of-sequence progress, with what to do about each.

Get it into Excel

Copy rows from the table straight into Excel, or save the programme as CSV. Programme Studio Pro exports a formatted Excel file, and saves back to P6 XER and XML and MS Project XML.