Global Change???

This depends really on the amount of data you have to change. setting up an xls file is one way.



but if you have only 10 activity groups to change a global change is the way to go. this way the links are updated.



beware that ActID changes with excel will create new work (res input, links etc).



If as you say the structures are well defined you could go for the fragnets.



like such:

select a group/save as fragnet/create new project/work there/when satisfied/resave fragnet/go to old project/retrieve fragnet/choose as appropriate.



BACKUP FIRST!!!

What Steven says is the best combination between ease of use and power of the technique. Export to Excel is especially good as you can run formulae in Excel, such as lookups and If/THEN statements to automate the changes. The one thing that you can’t make changes to with exoprt / import are the activity IDs as these are the key that P3 uses to decide what activities to put yopur re-imported data into. If you change the actid, the import will generate a new activity



The export will be in DBF format (avoid WK1, it has max activity constraints), which Excel can read in but sometimes has problems writing to.



For simple updates just make teh changes and save in DBF for re-importing. Excel can sometimes snip the data though so it’s always worth re-opening teh DBF file before you commit to the import just to be sure that the data you want is actually there. Backup your P3 plan before any import aswell,as it can all go South very quickly.



for anything a bit complex, or if you find that excel is snipping the DBF data, what I do is save the export file in .XLS and work in it until I have the finished product ready for import. Then I import the original DBF file into an access table and then import the .XLS table in on top of that. This cleans any nasty formatting off the file. If there are serious issues they will show up as an import error in Access, which protects your P3 plan. You will need to clean the formatting in teh excel file and try again



another option is to use Pervasive ODBC drivers to connect your plan to access. If you are comfortable with Acces this is a great way to make changes but it pugs straight into the P3 D-base so you need to know what you’re doing and have solid back-ups

Depending on your schedule, 2 alternative methods come to mind.



1. Highlight the activities and use the fill functionality.



2. Export your schedule to Excel, change and Import.





HTH