If you know how to use the Fill Down feature in Primavera P6 Professional, you may have found that the fill down feature in Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management (EPPM) does not work the same. Primavera P6 EPPM has its own fill down procedure for populating fields down a column.
Populating fields down a column in Primavera P6 EPPM is not as simple as using copy and paste. The copy and paste procedure in Primavera P6 EPPM copies too much information. If all you want to do is copy the contents of a field down a column than the fill down feature in P6 EPPM is the way to go.
Primavera P6 EPPM Fill Down
This article demonstrates a quick tip for populating fields down a column in Primavera P6 EPPM.
Below in Figure 1, is our demonstration project schedule.
Figure 1
We want to populate the Area activity code down the Area column. First we try the standard copy and paste to fill down the values. We right click on the Grade Site activity Area field. When we do a popup menu appears with the option to copy the row, Figure 2.
Figure 2
Well we just want to copy on field down the column, so the copy and paste procedure does too much for our purposes. So let’s demonstrate how to use the Fill Down feature. To begin we hold the shift key down and select the Pour Foundations Area field by left clicking on the cell, Figure 3.
Figure 3
Continuing we left click on the Grade Site Area field populated with the Below activity code value.
Figure 4
We then release the shift key and right click on the Grade Site Area field, and a popup menu appears, Figure 5.
Figure 5
From the popup menu we choose Fill Down, Figure 6.
Figure 6
Primavera P6 EPPM then populates all the selected activities down the Area column.
Figure 7
Finally, we click save to record our schedule update, Figure 8.
Figure 8
Summary
The classic copy and paste does not work for populating an activity code down a column; it does too much. It wants to copy the entire row, which is more than we want to do.
A more suitable feature for populating an activity code down a column is the Fill Down feature. The Fill Down feature enables the scheduler to duplicate a single activity code down a column. The Fill Down feature also works for both the activities in the activity view and projects in the project view. So when the copy and paste fails because it tries to do too much, the Fill Down feature is an efficient way to populate an activity code or project code down a column.