Automatically Hiding Completed Tasks

If you are a regular user of OnePager Pro with Microsoft Project, you already know about Flag20 and how it’s used to bring over tasks with a Yes value. However, there might be instances where you want to filter your tasks further and exclude tasks once they have finished. When this situation arises, you can use Conditional Import Rules to check not only for Flag20, but also for an incomplete status.

Let’s say we need OnePager to know when a task or milestone finishes so that it can be removed from the chart. Right out of the gate, this sounds like a very tedious task as you would need to not only track the status of each task but also mark them as No in your Flag20 field once they finish. Fear not, though, as there is a much faster and easier way to do this.

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Summary Task Percent Complete

When creating a schedule, one thing stands out when presenting to an audience: the percent complete. While it is nice to see the start and finish date for the summary tasks in the schedule, it is essential to show how far along a task is. Most of the time, your project plan’s percent complete values will suffice, but there are other times where the percent complete might seem ahead or behind schedule. In this blog, we will discuss what OnePager has to offer to remedy this issue: a feature called %Complete EV.

Before we begin discussing this exciting feature in OnePager, I want to clarify that this is a OnePager proprietary calculation that only looks at the percent complete for summary tasks. If you find that your issues are with the non-summary tasks, you should check out our blog that covers that issue here.

Microsoft Project averages all the tasks under the summary task, giving you an overall percent complete. However, this calculation can be incorrect due to other factors that Microsoft Project didn’t consider, which is what OnePager %Complete EV fixes. If you look at the example below, you will see that the Summary Task is behind schedule, even though all of its children are right on track.

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Multiple Values in Conditional Formatting

In my view, among the many great features of OnePager, none beat Conditional Formatting. With Conditional Formatting, you can create rules to change the color, shape, fill, and other properties of tasks and milestones based on specific rules that you set. However, what happens when you have multiple values to which you need the same rule to apply? You could create a bunch of separate rules, but that’s a lot of work. In this article, we will go over how you can create a conditional formatting rule that tests for multiple conditions at once.

Imagine with me, if you will, that you have a schedule with individual resources assigned to different tasks. Each resource is part of a specific team in your organization, and you would like to be able to color tasks based on the team that the people belong to, not based on their individual names.

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New in OnePager 7.1: Custom Hover Box Text

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:

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New in OnePager 7.1: Expanded Color Palettes

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:

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New in OnePager 7.1: Percent Complete Checkmarks

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:

Place a checkmark on the task or milestone once it is complete.
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New in OnePager 7.1: Emoji Milestone Shapes

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.

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New in OnePager 7.1: Hash Fill Patterns

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.

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OnePager Now Supports Primavera P6

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:

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