Monthly Archives: July 2014

Why Your Hidden Rows/Swimlanes Might Be Mysteriously Reappearing, and How to Fix It

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A couple of customers have e-mailed us reporting that the hidden rows/swimlanes in their project views have mysteriously reappeared. Let’s demystify this!

When you hide a row or swimlane, you also hide all of the task bars or milestones inside that row/swimlane. If, subsequently, the Flag value on one of those tasks gets changed (in Project/Excel) from No to Yes, OnePager by design unhides the row/swimlane so that the newly flagged task appears.

If this is not what you intend, you can easily suppress this unhiding behavior on the Advanced tab of the Project-View Properties menu:

Unhidden Rows

Simply uncheck the “Unhide rows for flagged tasks/milestones” option (which is checked by default) and hit OK. From now on, hidden rows/swimlanes will always stay hidden, even if the Flag value on one of the tasks/milestones inside those hidden rows/swimlanes changes to Yes.

Changing this Advanced setting provides a faster way of getting rid of unwanted rows/swimlanes –rather than re-hiding them one by one, which is probably not your first choice of a summer afternoon activity.

As always, we’re eager to hear your feedback about how you’re using OnePager and how we can make your experience better! Feel free to drop us a line anytime at [email protected].

Getting strange results in multi-project OnePagers? Check your Project Summary Task!

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In recent weeks we’ve been hearing from a lot of customers whose multi-project OnePager files are behaving strangely. Tasks that were previously red are now blue, or are showing up in the wrong row/swimlane, etc. – it’s like OnePager has amnesia. Needless to say, this is not a fun experience, for customers or for us! But we think we have identified the cause behind most of these problems, and the solution.

What’s going on is that Microsoft Project has a weird response when a user renames a .mpp file. What often occurs is that the Project Summary Task, which appears at the top (as task 0) in every MS Project file (see below), is also renamed when the .mpp file is renamed. This confuses OnePager in a multi-project environment. If OnePager is, say, sorting swimlanes by Project Name, it relies on the Project Summary Task of each individual project to determine what each Project Name is. If OnePager goes back to an MS Project file and the Project Summary Task has been renamed, OnePager thinks that it has never seen this project and its tasks before, and as a result task sorting and formatting is thrown off.

pst_1

Fortunately, the solution is simple: If you rename your .mpp file, immediately check your Project Summary Task, and if it has changed, rename it back to what it was before. To do this:

  1. From the Format menu of MS Project, in the Show/Hide group, check the box for Project Summary Task so it displays as task 0.
  2. Double-click on the Task Name of the Project Summary Task.
  3. In the dialog box that pops up (see below), change the “Name” field back to the original name of the project, if that name has changed.

pst_2

Unfortunately we are all at the mercy of MS Project on this issue. We don’t know of any automated way to instruct MS Project to preserve Project Summary Task names when a file rename occurs. So please check your Project Summary Task carefully whenever you rename a .mpp file. And of course feel free to get in touch with our support team ([email protected]) if you have any questions, or if your project views start to look a little strange!

Repeating Elements across Multiple Pages

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OnePager Pro and Express have several elements such as the title, time axes, rows and swimlanes, headers and footers, and the legend, which can be repeated across multiple pages in your report.

On the OnePager Page Layout tab, there is a section called Repeating Elements, which contains five of these options:

PageLayoutTab-RepeatingElements-05282014

When you turn these boxes on or off, you can control whether these elements appear on all pages, or just the first page. With all these boxes checked, all of the elements will appear on all of the pages in the multi-page project view as shown below:

PV-2X2-Allrepeatingelementschecked-05282014

If you uncheck the title, rows/swimlanes, and time axis boxes, the four pages will look like this:

PV-2X2-Somelrepeatingelementschecked-05282014

Repeating the legend is a more complex option and is configurable under Home->Project View Properties->Legend.