The XER toolkit provides a range of tools that make it easy to understand and communicate the calendar working patterns used in the development of a project schedule.
To access these tools, you need to click on the “Reports and Analysis” header menu option before selecting “The View and Manage Calendars” link. If your Project’s duration spans many years then scrolling through calendar months and P6 to find exceptions to the standard calendar can be very time consuming, the toolkit provides a couple of ways to tackle this.
Firstly, by selecting the “Edit Calendar” icon to the right of the desired project, the left-hand side window contains details of this calendar standard working week, with a green tab representing a day that has some working time assigned. To see the full details, you can click on the name of the required workday the working pattern of a day is split into quarter of an hour segments across the 24 hours, the green highlighted area also signifies working time. The window to the right of this contains a list of all exceptions to the standard working week, clicking on any individual day shows the full working details, which in this case is a bank holiday with no working time.
Another way to view the details of a calendar and communicate shift patterns is to export the calendar to a standard Excel workbook, to do this press the grey cancel button in the bottom right hand corner before clicking on the calendar wall chart icon at the end of the chosen projects row you can select a time frame which can be anything from one day to multiple years there are also quick links for pre-selecting the current year and beyond or you can spend specify a duration based on specific dates.
There are also further options to display a running working day counter along with the working hours per day once you have added all settings you need to click on the show calendar button, the wall chart produces a separate page for each calendar year selected and is colour coded in line with the legend at the top of the chart, since we opted to display working hours these are shown in the bracket for each working day the wall chart can be printed directly from here by using the print calendar option in the top left hand corner or we can export the calendar to an Excel file.
The toolkit will extract the requested data and collate into a downloadable calendar; the calendar is produced in a standard Excel workbook and creates separate worksheets for each of the annual wall charts there is also a detailed output summary sheet which provides the same sort of information we previously viewed using the toolkit’s calendar editor.
At the top of the worksheet you can see the working pattern of each day in a standard working week although this time split into 30 minute segments below this you can see the detailed working pattern for every day within the time period selected, in order to view all calendar exceptions we can employ excels built-in filter feature you should highlight the date day calendar exceptions and working hours fields before clicking on the sort and filter option from the top menu bar.
Under the calendar exceptions filter ensure only the X option is selected, now you will have access to view the full working pattern for each and every calendar exception.
