quick tip: mixing and and or options in primavera p6 filters

building a filter where all the conditions are either ‘and’ or ‘or’ between each row is pretty straightforward. however, if you want to mix them up a little its not so obvious how you should do that in oracle primavera p6 professional. this quick tip will show you how.

example: i want to find all the milestones in the project that have a date variance that is not equal to zero. in other words, i want to see any milestone that is now sitting on a date other than its baseline date.

because there are two types of milestone in primavera p6 professional, start and finish milestones, it’s often necessary to use the ‘or’ parameter to get them all. but if you need some ‘and’ conditions too, you need to do some extra thinking.

here’s how the filter for the above scenario needs to look.

variance milestone filter

above: the first two conditions must both be met (the activity is not completed and variance is not zero), and either of the second conditions can be met; in this case a start or a finish type milestone will meet the criteria.

to indent the or condition rows under the and condition rows, we inserted a new row below the last ‘and’ condition and assigned the ‘(any of the following)’ option to it. all subsequent rows will have an or option in the first column until we insert another ‘(all of the following)’ option.

once you get tuned into this method, you can build very powerful and sophisticated filters. you do need to think these through before attempting to build them. i generally try to start with all the ‘and’ conditions first, and then put my ‘or’ options below to avoid confusion and unnecessary complexity.

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