Another important upgrade in OnePager 7.0 is more flexibility when it comes to adding stripes to your chart. For example, you might want to highlight a given row in your chart by placing a stripe in the background:

Or, you might want to add a stripe to an entire swimlane instead:

In previous editions of OnePager, we gave you the ability to define a default pattern of swimlane stripes or row stripes that would alternate between two A/B colors. We also gave you the ability to highlight an individual swimlane cell, or an individual cell in a text column. However, we did not have the option to apply a custom highlight color to individually-selected swimlanes or rows until the launch of OnePager 7.0.

To add a custom stripe, simply click on the cell adjacent to the swimlane or the row that you want to highlight. Once it’s selected, use the paint bucket on the Home tab to apply whatever color you’d like.

If you still want to paint individual cells instead of entire rows or swimlanes themselves, you still can. To select an individual cell, click on the cell once, which will select the entire row or swimlane to the right of the cell, wait a second, and then click again. This is called a “slow left click” because a second or two passes between the first and second click. It’s different from a double-click, where both clicks happen in rapid succession. The trick to selecting a cell separately from the adjacent row or swimlane is the slow left click:

Once the individual cell is selected, you can paint it with the paint bucket as well. You can also hold down the Ctrl key to select other non-adjacent cells in the same column, or you can hold down the Shift key to select adjacent cells in the same column, if you want to apply formatting to multiple cells at once.

New Default Backgrounds

The instructions at the beginning of this article cover the new ways to add point-and-click backgrounds to charts in OnePager 7.0. However, we’ve also made some new default background settings available. The benefit to default background settings is that you can establish them once in a template and have them apply to all future charts created from that template, so they’re ideal for users who need to create a lot of charts in a similar style.

We have supported default row stripes and swimlane stripes for a long time, but these are expanded now that OnePager 7.0 includes up to three levels of swimlanes. To fine-tune the background of your chart, go to Home > Chart Properties > Main and adjust the settings for the Chart Background:

If you want to define separate backgrounds for your swimlane cells or for cells in your text columns, OnePager 7.0 now supports that as well. Previously, these were tied to the row or swimlane stripes that defined the overall chart background and could only be changed manually if they needed to be a different color.

Default cell backgrounds are configured on the Chart Properties > Rows/Swimlanes tab:

The button for Swimlane Formatting controls the swimlane cell backgrounds for whichever swimlane level you’re on. Remember that OnePager 7.0 now supports up to three levels of swimlanes, so make sure you know which swimlane level you have active before clicking the Swimlane Formatting button. In the example above, the Left #2 swimlane tab is selected.

There is a separate button for Text Column Formatting, which controls the backgrounds for the cells in your text columns. Again, you can have up to five text columns in a OnePager chart, so this button will control whichever text column you currently have active. In the example above, the Left #1 text column tab is selected.

Regardless of whether you click on the Swimlane Formatting or the Text Column Formatting button, the options you have will be similar:

Here, we can set a default cell background pattern that alternates between dark green and light green. This will only stripe the cells of swimlane Left #2. Backgrounds of the swimlanes themselves themselves can be something completely different, depending on how the overall background of your chart has been configured.

You can change the look and feel of the column heading as well. Here, we’ve given the swimlane column a custom heading called “My Custom Heading” and have changed its background to purple. In previous versions of OnePager, you could make these changes manually, but they wouldn’t be something that could be saved off to a template for more widespread use.