Strengths & Weaknessses of Ms Project & Primavera P6

Hi Mark

You forgot Asta PowerProject and Spider - both far superior to P6.

I am also recognising some repetion in your threads promoting "Path Approximator"

Is this some sort of commercial pitch?

If so please refer to Clause 10 in PP rules.

Best regards

Mike Testro - Forum Moderator

Hi John, iqbal, Daniel...

MSP by itself does not have the capability for enterprise-wide multiple project work without a considerable amount of custom programming, however, MS Project Server + MS Project certainly does. The existence of two related programs allows companies to select the level of financial commitment.

P3 has had an add-on VBA driver available for some time. It's quite likely that most schedulers are unaware of the existence of said driver. I have personally never met another scheduler who was aware of the existence of the driver nor who knew how to use it. P6 appears to have VBA more seamlessly integrated into the user experience.

In any case, both programs are now at the stage where using VBA allows programming a correction of almost any lack in features or weakness. What either program lacks in ease of use or reporting (or whatever) can be programmed via DDE in VBA.

The result is that if you wish to control either MSP or Primavera from Excel, Access, Word or even Outlook, those programs can supply missing functionality. (I wouldn't recommend Word unless you are planning to write a book, however it is doable). Personally, receiving progress updates in Outlook and having Primavera/Project automatically update is a real timesaver especially when the progress submitters are neither scheduling experts nor computer experts.

Also, it is significantly less expensive to have a typist entering progress data into an Excel spreadsheet which in turn updates the schedule than to type it in yourself (assuming a difference in pay in favour of the scheduler or planner).

Ultimately, VBA allows programming such that some people can use Primavera and others can use Project for the same project at the same time with both being up-to date while seamlessly reporting in Excel and sending automated notifications and/or requests for schedule updates via Outlook. Furthermore, having Excel run a Monte Carlo-type risk analysis in the background while this is all going on is quite handy as well.

In conclusion, neither program is better/stronger than the other if all program features are fully utilized. However, the less actual skill (not experience, since many have plenty of experience but little skill) a user has with either program, the more significant the perceived differences become. Add to that the fact that a very large number of users learn the use of any program in the most difficult manner possible (e.g. by not reading the manual, among other things) and a significant amount of resistance to the use of another program is generated. Net result: sloganeering along the lines of "Program A is much better/has feature X/etc."

The greatest weaknesses are almost always between the ears of the users of the programs.

Hi All  What MS project and P6 do not have

1- MS Project had a computed columns where p6. upto ver 7 do not have

2- MS Project had a programming language where p6. upto ver 7 do not have

3-MS project is ( understandably ) more flexible in importing and exporting with mircosfot office packages and in specificlly excel. P6 had limited Excel importing and exporting

Hi John,

I think as planners, we can evaluate both softwares, so let me start and hope we can have a good comparison and intelligently decide which sofware is right for our project.

1.) P6 is capable of handling multiple project enterprise wide. MSP does not have this capability

2.)