How it works
Drop a .xer file exported from Primavera P6. The converter reads it on your device and builds an Excel workbook you download — no upload, no server, no account. A schedule often carries costs, rates and resource names; with this converter none of it leaves your computer. Online converters that take an upload can’t say that.
Export an XER from P6 Professional
- Open the project you want to export.
- Choose File → Export, then Primavera PM - (XER), pick the XER version, and click Next.
- Choose Project and click Next.
- Tick Export for the project, type a file name and where to save it, click Finish, then Close.
Steps from Oracle’s P6 Professional Importing and Exporting Guide. No P6 of your own? Ask your scheduler for the XER — it’s the file P6 schedules travel in.
Why a schedule in Excel
- Share it with people who don’t have P6 — foremen, owners, subcontractors — as a file every computer opens.
- Filter it with tools everyone knows — one area or trade by its activity-code column, everything finishing in the next three weeks, everything with negative float.
- Build your own reports — pivot tables of float by WBS or durations by activity code, from the flat Activities sheet.
- Keep a record of every update — convert each period’s XER and the workbooks sit side by side; the Schedule Comparison tool below shows exactly what changed.
What’s in the workbook
- Summary — the project, its data date, the P6 version it came from, the relationship-lag calendar, the hours per day of the activity calendars, and a row count for every sheet.
- Activities — one row per activity: Activity ID and name, WBS, type, status, start and finish, actual start and finish, original and remaining duration and total float in days, percent complete, calendar, and a column for each activity code.
- Activities (P6 View) — the same activities grouped under their WBS and banded the way P6’s Gantt table shows them, with outline levels you can collapse.
- Relationships — predecessor and successor (ID and name), the relationship type, the lag in days and hours, and the calendar the lag is scheduled on.
- WBS — every WBS element with its code, name and full path.
- Every other table in the file — calendars, resources, codes and the rest, each on its own sheet, as P6 wrote them.
Common questions
Is my schedule uploaded?
No. The page reads the file and writes the workbook in your browser. We count that a conversion ran and how many rows it had — never file names or contents.
Which P6 versions does it read?
It reads the tables the XER itself declares instead of assuming a version’s layout, and it handles UTF-8, UTF-16 and Windows-1252 files. It reads XER; P6 XML isn’t supported.
What about activity codes, resources and user-defined fields?
Each activity code gets its own column on the Activities sheet. Resource assignments, user-defined fields and everything else the export carries stay in their own P6 tables — TASKRSRC, UDFVALUE and the rest — each on a sheet of its own.
Does it reschedule anything?
No. The dates, float and progress are what P6 calculated at the data date. Durations and float are converted from hours to days with each activity’s calendar hours per day.
How large a schedule?
Schedules of 10,000 activities or more need a laptop or desktop — phones run out of memory building the workbook.
More schedule tools
The same in-browser reading powers the free Schedule Comparison, Look-Ahead, Schedule Health and Labor Histogram tools.
