An XER file is the format Oracle Primavera P6 writes when you export a project schedule: plain text, the whole schedule inside, and no P6 licence needed to read it.
What Is a Primavera P6 XER Project File?
An XER file is a file format natively used by the Oracle® Primavera P6 enterprise project and portfolio planning and management software solutions. Software tools from the Primavera suite of Construction and Engineering solutions such as the P6 use the XER file format to store schedule data about the projects created within the application.
The XER file format is used to store the data upon export and communicate the project information between different project stakeholders and P6 databases.
In its textual structure, this file format has the potential to store an enormous amount of project data. The P6 application is a complex solution dedicated to matching the needs of large organizations and therefore it has the potential to store schedule data in more than 170 tables, associated with different relationships. When this data is exported on an XER file it is roughly gathered in 20 to 66 tables. Different categories of project data are imprinted into the output file, such as records and data values for Global, Project, Activity Codes, Calendars, Activities, Projects, Resources, and their inter-relationships.
This .xer file reader is a standalone, independently developed software solution and it is not connected or associated with the Oracle® corporation.
How to Open One
Opening an XER file is a separate job from knowing what it contains, so the steps live on their own page: open an XER file with ScheduleReader covers the desktop app on Windows and macOS, reading the file in Excel or a text editor, opening it in the browser, and what to try when a file will not open.