Different Pipelines to Connect Primavera P6 to Power BI

There are several pipelines to transfer data from Primavera P6 to Power BI

1.      Excel

2.      XML

3.      XER

4.      SQLite database

There is also the P6ETL® utility by Paul Ciszewski, PMP of Mustang Technologies you can check out.

You can host your files on your local drive as a single file or multiple through a Folder, SharePoint, One Drive, Google Drive, etc.

There are two ways to use Microsoft Excel:

a.      Copy your data from P6 to Excel, carry out cleaning and arranging your data in tables before getting them into Power BI

b.      Dump your data from Excel, do not clean, and get the Excel file into Power BI.

I personally prefer and love using method b for two reasons even though method a helps you to bypass doing plenty of cleaning in Power BI. Using method b has so much helped improve my cleaning and data wrangling capability within Power Query.

When you use method a, you will always need to modify your data whenever you copy from P6 but if you take the pain to clean up the data in Power Query, you will NEVER need to clean again (as long as you are using the same dataset). Power query automatically does future cleaning for you: just copy your data and click refresh in Primavera!

Finally, method b is the easiest and best approach to get data when you are hosting on a Folder or multi-teamwork online (SharePoint or OneDrive or others).

Do you know any other method? Please share your thoughts in the comment section!