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Home Support OnePager 7.0 New Features

Multiple Swimlane Levels (Sub-Swimlanes)

OnePager 7.0 now supports up to three levels of nested swimlanes, also called sub-swimlanes, for expanded grouping and sorting.

OnePager 6.1 and earlier traditionally supported a single level of swimlanes, enabling users to group rows together based on a single value. In OnePager 7.0, we have expanded to a total of three levels of swimlanes, which nest inside each other as parent swimlanes and child swimlanes to better display the hierarchy of projects and programs.

Multiple swimlane levels in a OnePager Gantt chart with a parent swimlane and multiple child swimlanes or sub-swimlanes.

When multiple swimlane levels are used, the largest grouping will always be in the left-most parent swimlane, and smaller sub-swimlane groupings will follow as child swimlanes from left-to-right. In this example, we have three levels of swimlanes:

  • First Swimlane (Parent): Program
  • Second Swimlane (Child): Project
  • Third Swimlane (Grandchild): Phase

When you upgrade from an earlier version of OnePager, your old swimlanes will be converted to the left-most parent swimlane in the hierarchy, so any new child swimlanes that you add will be to the right of your original parent swimlanes as sub-swimlanes unless you rearrange them.

Turning on Multiple Swimlane (Sub-Swimlane) Levels

  1. To turn on more than one swimlane level, go to Home > Chart Properties > Rows/Swimlanes.

  2. In the redesigned Swimlanes section, there are three tabs: Left #1, Left #2, and Left #3:

    Settings for Multiple Swimlane Levels. The left-most tab is the parent swimlane. The two sub-swimlanes on the second and third tabs are often called the child swimlane and grandchild swimlane.

  3. Each swimlane level can group based on a different field from Microsoft Project or Excel. We recommend grouping swimlanes by fields that have a natural hierarchy relative to each other. For example, grouping by "Project Name", then "Level 1 Summary Name", and finally "Level 2 Summary Name" will cascade correctly, and your child swimlanes will nest nicely within the parent swimlanes based on the data that you already have in Microsoft Project or Excel. You can, of course, select any field to drive any level of swimlanes and sub-swimlanes, but keep hierarchies in mind when doing so.

  4. The font for swimlane text and the overall width of swimlanes are also configurable in this same area. For more advanced swimlane formatting, including backgrounds, text rotation, and custom swimlane headings, click the Swimlane Formatting button, which will provided an expanded selection of settings, many of which are new in OnePager 7.0.

  5. Each swimlane level can also be sorted independently. We recommend either sorting your swimlanes based on the order of your underlying project plan (Sort Swimlanes like Project/Excel) or sorting your swimlanes based on the same field that you used to group your swimlanes in the first place. For example, if your swimlanes are grouped based on "Text 1", you can sort swimlanes alphabetically based on "Text 1" as well. If you sort your swimlanes by a field that is different than the field you used to group your swimlanes, keep in mind that your sort order may not be what you expect, especially if each swimlane has a heterogeneous set of values in the sorting field compared to the grouping field.