New to scheduling on a P6 project

You were handed an XER and asked to keep it current. No scheduling background needed: five stops, and the file survives all of them.

First stop: open it. Nothing you do in here can harm the file you were given. Your XER sits in Files. Its pencil opens it to try things out. See Open a schedule.

It opens in its own window: XER, the Advanced engine, and a banner saying nothing is saved yet. It arrives in Full mode. Choose Simple: six columns, links by name, and dates that follow every change.

Name, start, finish, duration, percent done, assigned to. Two thousand rows, and the page is quite unbothered. Second stop: what you are looking at. A Gantt chart is a map, and every map has a key.

A diamond is a milestone: a moment, such as an access date, rather than a stretch of work. Two thousand rows is a lot. Find takes a few letters, and only your part stays.

The dashed blue line is the data date: left of it has happened, right of it is forecast. Red means critical: lose a day here, and the finish loses it too. See How scheduling works.

Most work has float: time an activity can slip before anything after it notices. Spend it, and nothing else moves. The finish stays exactly where it was.

Spend more than there is, and the finish goes too. That chain is the critical path, the red on your chart. Third stop: status it. Every week, two questions: how far along is everything, and as of when?

How far along? Type it in percent done: the bar shortens, and here it even stops being critical. Finished? Not while it should finish after the data date. That line has to move first.

The data date lives in Full mode: More, then Schedule, Set data date. Moving it changes the schedule, and an uploaded file is never changed. So: Save as first.

The copy keeps the name, with edited after it. The next stop says what that bought you. Now the date, a week on. Spotlight shows what should have happened in between.

Spotlight hatches the week and highlights the two activities that should have moved in it. Update progress marks them as planned: actual dates kept, remaining work counted from the new date.

In Full mode this file waits to be told: Schedule, or F9, works the dates out again. What moved reports the effect: the finish comes in from 30 May to 24 May. See Progress.

Fourth stop: Save as. You met it a moment ago; here is what it does, and what it saves you from. Before it, the note at the foot was amber: your edits lived in this page and nowhere else.

Close the window by accident, and reopening offers the edit back. Recover, then Save as. After it, a PC.o Schedule of your own: the title says edited, the badge says PC.o.

And it saves itself from now on, with no button to remember. See Saving, Save as and recovery. In Files the copy sits under the XER it came from; the XER stays exactly as it was.

Last stop: hand it back. The planner wants a file; the site wants something it can print. For the planner: File, Export, XER. P6 XML and the others sit beside it. See Exports and print.

With a baseline pinned, it asks which planned dates to write: the baseline's, or the schedule's own. For the site: the chart view's Export makes a three-week look-ahead in Excel. See Excel in and out.

Three weeks from the data date; change either date if the site asks, then Download. The other way round, a planner's request for your dates arrives as a link. See The update process.

That is the weekly update, start to finish. Every stop has its own short entry. Next in the Guide: the library.

Taken from the video’s English captions.