You may be under a misconception here; P3 is not the same program as P6. P6 is not just a later version of P3. Primavera Marketing decided to try to re-write history in order to make P3 disappear. After all, “why would someone want P3 when they could have the same program three versions later for the same price?”

P3 (short for Primavera Project Planner) was developed in 1985 and is still being sold today. P3 is at Version 3.1 and will never be upgraded any further. P3 is a ‘work horse’ and the preferred platform for a large number of companies and municipalities in the USA for construction.

P6 was released in 1999 as Primavera for the Enterprise (or some other similar name.) Primavera’s marketing arm renamed the software to a new name with every version release. The version designations started with Version 1 and now the current version is Version 6.1. Everyone in the world got so tired of Primavera remaining the product every year that they started calling Version 5, “P5” (the official name of the software was, “Primavera.”) That nomenclature stuck and Primavera itself released the version 6 software under the new name (again) of “P6.”

P6 does not work like P3. Knowing P3 will not translate into instant P6 success. P6 is different, based upon an enterprise concept that requires much more system maintenance. It can handle more projects and simultaneous users than P3 can. P6 has way more features and complexity than P3. P3 still has better reports and graphics then P6.

P6 is hourly based but can display durations in whole number of days. This hours-to-days thing causes 1-day apparent errors that P3 is not susceptible to. P6 is also problematic if you store schedules for different clients together. Imported calendars do not stay with the projects (without careful, expert attention) and resource definitions from one project overwrite the resource definitions for other projects.

It is true that if you have a maintenance agreement with Primavera, that they will let you ‘upgrade’ from P3 to P6 for a nominal fee. This upgrade consists of deleting P3 from your computer and installing P6. I caution you to consider the loss of experience using P3 when you upgrade to P6. You will need to re-train all over again. P6 also requires four times (or more) power and space on your computer to run. Don’t upgrade without at least 1 GB of RAM and a fast CPU. Good luck!