Safford is a versatile technology professional with a solid history of empowering emerging growth companies in a broad array of industries. His employment history includes energy industry consulting at Quorum Software, Senior Manager of Client Services and Technical Sales at telecom service aggregator GetConnected, and Vice President of Strategic Partner Management at electronic payment processor IP Commerce. Prior to his tenure as OnePager's COO, Safford was the company's Vice President of Marketing and Alliances. Safford holds a BA in Psychology and management from Rice University.
Earlier this year, after years of focusing primarily on the Microsoft Project user base, we announced two new connections to Smartsheet and Oracle Primavera P6 as a part of our 7.1 release. We’re continuing to evaluate new connections, and would like feedback from our existing customers as to which would be helpful:
In the survey, we’ll ask you which connections you’re using today, and which connections you think might be helpful in the future as your company grows its use of OnePager. If you’re happy with the connections that we offer today and don’t see a need for anything else right now, that would be helpful for us to know as well.
Most users create their OnePager charts and then export them to PowerPoint or PDF before sharing them. But some people prefer OnePager as their native presentation tool, using the live OnePager chart in their project meetings. Live OnePager charts have always supported Hover Boxes, which are boxes of text that pop up whenever you hover your mouse over a task or milestone:
Much in the same way that we expanded our milestone shapes by adding emojis in OnePager 7.1, we’ve expanded the number of available color palettes as well. While it’s true that users have always been able to create their own custom color palettes to match their own corporate branding, we also understand that not all users have the time or patience to do that. So we thought that making more standard color palettes available would be a welcome addition.
Here are some examples of the new color palettes that are available beginning in OnePager 7.1. All are named after global cities:
Up next in our review of what’s new in OnePager 7.1 are percent complete checkmarks, which are a great way to display which tasks and milestones are finished without getting into the nitty gritty of how far along everything else is. In short, anything that is finished will show a checkmark, while things that aren’t yet complete–whether it’s 0% or 99%–won’t:
With OnePager 7.1 comes a significant expansion to our milestone shapes: emojis.
It’s not just fun and games, though there is a poop emoji if you need one, and we have it on good authority that one customer is actually using it to call people out when they miss deadlines.
All kidding aside, users have come to us requesting the ability to have multi-colored milestone shapes, basically miniature pieces of clipart, and this is where emojis really deliver. With our traditional milestone shapes, you could paint them one color, but with emojis, they’re multi-colored by nature and you don’t have to take time to format them; their colors come automatically out of the box, and we think they look great.
In addition to the new connections to Smartsheet and Primavera P6 that we’ve covered over the last few weeks, there are a number of other exciting new updates in OnePager 7.1 that work with all editions and all data sources.
The first of these upgrades is the ability to add hash fill patterns to any chart:
Hash fills enable you to apply a repeating pattern to the foreground color of your tasks and milestones, and have that pattern appear on top of a separate background color of your choosing. In the example above, all three shapes have a white background, but have varied foreground colors and hash fill patterns.
In addition to our new Smartsheet connection that we announced a few weeks ago, we’re pleased to announce that OnePager Bundle 7.1 also has the ability to import data from Primavera P6.
For our many customers in the federal government, as well as those in construction, engineering, and energy, this should come as great news. The new connection eliminates the need to export from Primavera P6 into Excel, and instead gives users a choice or either XML or XER format.
Watch this short video to see how easy we make it to import Primavera P6 schedules into OnePager:
We’re excited to announce that beginning with OnePager version 7.1, specifically the OnePager Bundle edition, we now support a direct connection to Smartsheet. If you’re a long-time OnePager user and are thinking of switching to Smartsheet, now you can. If you’re already using Smartsheet and have been making do with an Excel export, you now have a much more streamlined path.
Watch this short video to see how easy we make it to connect OnePager to Smartsheet:
The Estimated field in Microsoft Project lets you identify tasks for which dates aren’t yet set in stone:
Simply place a “Yes” next to tasks that are estimated, and leave everything else alone. If you want to make a distinction between estimated and firm tasks in your OnePager chart, you can do so with conditional formatting.
To launch conditional formatting, go to Home > Chart Properties > TaskBars, and then click the Manage Rules button in the bottom. We’re starting out with some conditional formatting rules that assign different colors based on the Status field:
A lot of beginner OnePager users assume that conditional formatting can only used for color, or that conditional formatting can only look at one Microsoft Project field at a time. Both of these assumptions are incorrect. Even though we already have a set of rules that assign color based on status, we can add a separate rule that looks for tasks where the Estimated flag field is true:Once you’ve set up the condition, scroll to the right and assign a dotted border, like this:Click OK on the border selector, and you’ll see the dotted border appear in the conditional formatting grid:
Click OK to close the Conditional FormattingRules screen, and then click OK again to close Chart Properties. Your chart will update so that all estimated tasks appear with a dotted black border, while still retaining their main colors that are based on status:
Those of you who are seasoned users of OnePager know that you can show deadline markers in your OnePager chart, which appear (hopefully) to the right of your main task bars:
Traditionally, deadline symbols don’t appear without their associated task, and even if they did, their formatting options are pretty limited, since they’re not something that is controlled by conditional formatting, or even really very easy to edit by hand.
