Refresh, don't rebuild — keep your summary in step with the master

You built a clean board summary from your P6, MSP or Excel master last month. Then the master got updated, and the summary is now a museum piece. The fix isn't to rebuild it — it's to relink it. Point Refresh at the new file, read the diff of what actually changed, and apply it. A couple of clicks, not another evening in the plotter room.

Here's the monthly trap. You spend an hour turning a three-thousand-line control schedule into a one-page summary the board can actually read. It looks great. Everyone signs it off. Then the next update cycle lands, dates move, a few activities appear, a couple drop out — and your beautiful one-pager is quietly wrong. So you do the only thing screenshot-and-paste ever lets you do: you throw it away and build it again from scratch.

That's the waste. The summary was never the hard part — the layout, the branding, the section bands, the milestones you promoted, the phases you merged and reordered. All of that survives. The only thing that changed is the underlying dates. So the right operation isn't "rebuild"; it's "re-sync the numbers, keep the picture." That's exactly what Refresh does — and, crucially, it shows you what moved before you accept it.

The link stays, so the picture stays

When you first import a master — a P6 XER/XML, an MS Project XML, or an Excel/CSV export — Sketchedule remembers where every summary bar, band and milestone came from. Each activity keeps its source identity (its P6 activity ID, its MSP unique ID, or the key column you mapped from a spreadsheet). That link is the thing that makes a refresh possible: next month's file isn't a stranger, it's the same programme with newer numbers, and Sketchedule can line the two up row by row.

Because the link is by identity, not by row position, it doesn't matter that the planner inserted forty new activities in the middle or resorted the WBS. Sketchedule matches on the ID, works out what moved, what's new and what's gone, and re-flows your existing summary onto the current dates. Your merged phases stay merged. Your hidden rows stay hidden. Your logo, header and RAG rules stay exactly where you put them.

The diff you review before anything changes

This is the part that earns trust. Refresh never silently overwrites your board pack. It reads the new master, compares it against what you've got, and stops to show you a diff — a plain, reviewable list of exactly what it's about to do, grouped three ways:

• Changed — activities whose start, finish or duration moved. You see the old date and the new one side by side, so a two-week slip on the critical phase is impossible to miss.
• Added — activities in the new master that weren't there before. New scope, a broken-out work package, a milestone the client asked for.
• Obsolete — activities that were in your summary but have vanished from the master. Deleted, merged away, or renumbered. Nothing gets removed from your view until you say so.

You scan it, you sanity-check it against what you know moved this period, and only then do you hit apply. If something looks wrong — an "obsolete" that's really just been renumbered, say — you catch it here, on one screen, instead of discovering it on the boardroom projector. The diff is the whole reason this is safe to do in two clicks: you're not trusting a black box, you're approving a change list.

A worked monthly refresh

Take a live one. You publish a Level 1 board summary for the Westbridge programme, built from the P6 master, rev 13. This period the planner issues rev 14. You don't reopen the summary and start rebuilding — you refresh it.

1. Open your summary. Open the board view you already built and signed off last period — layout, branding, section bands and milestones all intact.
2. Hit Refresh. On the ribbon, choose Refresh / relink. Sketchedule knows this view was built from a master and asks for the updated one.
3. Point it at the new master. Drop in rev14.xer (or the MSP XML / Excel export). It's parsed in your browser — nothing is uploaded, the programme never leaves your machine.
4. Review the diff. Sketchedule matches by activity ID and shows the change list (Fig 2): 6 dates moved · 2 added · 1 obsolete. You check the +21-day slip on the pump award is real, confirm the merged cabins activity really is gone, and note the two additions.
5. Apply. Accept the changes. The summary bars re-flow onto the new dates, the two additions slot into the right section, the obsolete row drops out — and everything you built around the dates stays put. Re-export the PDF/PPT or reshare the read-only link, and the board pack is current again (Fig 3).

Why this beats starting over

The category this replaces is the monthly rebuild. Screenshot-and-paste into slides starts from a blank frame every period — you re-crop, re-align, re-type. Desktop presentation add-ins bolt onto the scheduling tool and mostly re-render the whole layout, so your bespoke arrangement is fragile against the next update. Cloud work-OS tools want you to re-import and re-configure. All of them treat the update as a fresh build.

A refresh treats it as what it actually is: a data change against a stable presentation. You keep the picture and swap the numbers, under review. That's the difference between a two-click monthly chore and a recurring evening you'll never get back.

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 Oracle or Microsoft. Figures are illustrative, drawn in Sketchedule; Fig 3 is a faithful redraw of the app's board view.