The icons on the toolbar have been simplified and modernised, but the position and layout of Menu tabs or options has not changed.

There are now more progress display options on the Bar Chart to increase the clarity and impact of actual progress marking, progress lines and colour-schemes. You can now display progress lines and shading in the Date Zone. This can help to make the report date of each progress period more obvious, particularly when progress lines are displayed as jagged rather than straight. You can choose to make the actual progress marking fill the whole task depth, rather than only the top half of the task. You can make all progress period marking and lines have a single selected colour.

Previously, if you chose to include legends in a printout, they always printed on the final page. You can now also choose to print legends at the bottom of each page and whether it includes only those codes appearing on that page or all items that appear somewhere in the printout.

A new View type is available to see tasks (and/or resources) on a calendar grid. This will aid the communication with all participants in a Day/Week or Month period for a specific project and offers an alternative to a Bar Chart or spreadsheet table.

Before this release, milestones were limited in appearance to a single diamond shape. However, you can now apply a wide range of shapes from the new “milestone appearance library” that has been added to Library Explorer. You may want to use different shaped milestones to differentiate between Start and Finish milestones for example, or to represent different types of event such as watertight, power-on or client handover. For each milestone appearance, you can specify its name, the way in which the milestone is aligned in relation to the actual point of time and the order in which the milestones appear in an optional legend in printouts. Colour is still determined based on Code Library assignment.

Before this release, you could display only the codes from a single library on the Bar Chart at any one time. Some users wanted to display at the same time the codes from more than one Code Library and, to get around this restriction, created all of their codes in a single Code Library which could become difficult to maintain. Now, you can display the codes from more than one Code Library on the Bar Chart at the same time. This makes it easier to maintain, use and communicate different Code Libraries for distinct purposes.

You can now group the tasks in a view by day, week, month, quarter or year for any date field (e.g. start, finish, late-finish, etc.). For example, you could group together all the tasks planned to start in each week.

Before this release, you could export and import projects in Primavera P6® XER format. In addition to this, you can now choose to export and import in the P6 XML format.

As well as being able to enter text notes against tasks, you can now also enter three additional types of dated notes, against which the creation date and time of each note is recorded. The following types are available:

• Text notes – with a title and further text detail if necessary.
• File notes – these are hyperlinks which can be clicked to open a particular file. Use these notes to attach relevant documents or photographs to tasks.
• URL notes – these are hyperlinks which can be clicked to open a particular webpage. Use these notes to link relevant webpages to tasks.

• Override the colour of all progress shading with a single colour of your choice
• Display an indicator in the spreadsheet to identify the status of tasks
• Select objects in the bar chart using an area select tool
• Use histograms to graph task work and activity days
• Scale the font in text annotations and task notes when printing – ‘Planned actual task work’ and ‘Planned task work remaining’ fields have been added to the Progress group of fields
• Filter for tasks with links of a particular type
• Filter for tasks with links that have lead/lag
• Chase link logic through a project using the properties view and Bar and Task Properties dialog
• Specify more than one name or ID when creating or moving links using the Link From/To dialog
• Use colour themes to apply the same colour to all elements of links when editing link categories
• Specify the appearance of the Selected link category
• Remove progress from tasks according to the progress period in which it was recorded
• International currency code now stored against currency units