Importing a mixture of milestones and summary activities from Primavera P6

Primavera P6 treats the WBS as structure, not as activities you can flag — which is exactly why pulling "the summaries plus a few key milestones" onto a one-page timeline is so fiddly in most tools. Here's how Sketchedule handles the mixture: it rebuilds the WBS for you, keeps milestones, summaries and activities distinct, and lets you choose precisely what lands on the page.

Why P6 makes this awkward

In P6, a WBS node isn't an activity. It carries no dates you can plot and — crucially — it can't be ticked "include me" the way an activity can. So when you want a board-ready one-pager showing the WBS skeleton plus a handful of milestones, you're stuck between "import everything and delete for an hour" and "flatten it and lose the structure." Neither is a good Thursday afternoon.

What happens the moment you import

Open File ▸ Import schedule (MS Project / Primavera)… and drop in a .xer or P6 XML file. Before you touch anything, three things are already right:

• The WBS becomes section bands. Sketchedule reads the PROJWBS hierarchy, works out how deep each node sits, and lays the whole tree out as nested heading rows — no manual re-typing of your structure.
• The milestone/summary/activity mixture is preserved. A P6 activity typed as a milestone comes in as a diamond; ordinary activities come in as bars; WBS nodes become the bands above them. A schedule that mixes all three imports looking like a schedule, not a flat list.
• Your P6 identity is kept. Each row remembers its P6 task_id, so after you've reshaped the one-pager you can Write back to P6 / MS Project and update the original activities by ID — dates and % complete flow home.

Choosing exactly what imports

Sometimes the whole file is too much. You want the WBS plus a few milestones — or only two of five summary branches. The import filter gives you that control at the moment of import, the same way you'd build a filter in P6 itself:

• By type. Tick which of Tasks, Milestones, WBS Summary activities and Level-of-Effort you want on the page.
• By a P6 code or user-defined field. Add a rule like Sketch = Y or Activity ID begins with "MS" — create a user-defined field called Sketch in P6, flag the rows you want, and only those come in.
• By WBS branch. A checkbox tree of the WBS lets you include Summary 1 and Summary 2 while leaving Summary 3 out entirely — and empty bands are pruned automatically.
• Combine with ANY / ALL. "Bring in the whole WBS or anything flagged Y" is a two-rule filter set to ANY — exactly the pattern P6 planners already know.

And if you'd rather trim after import

You don't have to decide everything up front. Once a schedule is in, you can delete or collapse WBS branches, hide columns from print, filter rows, and use Smart Summary to roll the whole programme up to an outline level — MS Project-style — all on your device. The import filter just saves you doing it by hand when the file is large.

Primavera and P6 are trademarks of Oracle Corporation; Microsoft Project is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation. Sketchedule is an independent product and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by either. Figures are illustrative, drawn in Sketchedule.