Open Zipped XER files in Primavera P6 v18 – New Feature

As of Primavera P6 version 18, you can now import zipped XER files directly into Primavera P6.

There’s no need to uncompress them first. Primavera P6 will read the zip archive directly.

Check out our zipped xer files video tutorial to see firsthand how it all works….and also what doesn’t work.

How To Import Zipped XER Files in Primavera P6

Hey, folks. Thanks for visiting Plan Academy. I’m Michael, and I’m going to show you now how you can import zipped XER files.

That’s right. Did you know you can now import an XER file that has been zipped up, compressed so it’s smaller, and you can import that directly into P6 without uncompressing it?

This is a new feature that’s available as of version 18, released in 2018. I’m working with the latest version, version 18.8, that was released at the end of August.

Okay, let’s go through it. Let me show you how it works.

So, what I’ve done here, I have my P6 open and I took a bunch of these projects. I opened them and I exported them to a single XER file. I did that before I started this video.

And I have this XER file here, it’s called “bunch of projects”, XER file.

Now, what I did is I took that XER file and added it to a ZIP. I just put it into a ZIP folder.

So, here’s what’s in the ZIP: one file, XER. So, “bunch of projects” in the XER. That XER is zipped.

Now, let’s see how we can import that.

So, I’m gonna go ahead and do File, Import, XER, Project, and I’m just gonna go find that file.

It’s on my desktop, but where is it? Where is it?

Oh, yes. I need to change the file type here to Any File (*.*).

It’d be nice if it defaulted to ZIP, but maybe that’s coming up.

And here is my bunch of projects.zip. I’ll go ahead and open it and choose Next, and here, we can see that Primavera is reading that file, can see all of the different projects inside that XER file, and I can go ahead and import them.

PS: I’m waiting for ScheduleReader to adopt this feature of reading zipped xer files as well.

So, I could proceed with that if I want.

What Doesn’t Work With Zipped XER Files

But let me show you just one little pitfall of this, or one thing you should be aware of, how it works.

I have another ZIP file called “myxerfiles.zip”, and I’ll show you what’s in that.

I just went and took a bunch of XER files and added them to this ZIP file, and I wanted to see if I could import them.

So, let’s see what happens. And I’ll just go, once again, find that guy. “myxerfiles”, and when I go ahead and go.

Next, I get some sort of error that says Connected Mode. So, it’s not very informative, but I’m not able to move any further.

So, the deal is, you can only have one XER file inside the ZIP.

You can’t have multiple XER files and expect P6 to open them all.

But the good news is is that we have a nice new feature that allows us to compress XER files down and import them directly into Primavera P6.

This makes it a little bit easier to store them in ZIP file format on your hard drive if you want or to email around large files. They can be zipped and easily passed back and forth.

Hope you found this informative. I’m Michael. Thanks for visiting Plan Academy. We’ll see you next time.

Wrap Up

How is this new feature going to affect you?

Is Primavera moving in the right direction?

Let me know your opinion by leaving a comment below.