About Timeline View

Timeline view helps you create charts for capacity planning by organizing your data into a visual layout based on one Field: The Swimlane field. The Swimlane field (and, by extension, Timeline view as a whole) allows you to visually identify resource allocation or blockers between team members.

Each record is plotted on the Timeline based on the values in three fields: The Swimlane field, Start Date field, and End Date field. Here's how:

Before you are able to see your data in Timeline view, you need to make a few selections so your workbook knows which data you'd like displayed, and how. Let's walk through those selections now.

First, decide how you want your data to be grouped by choosing a Swimlane field. Any drop-down field in your workbook can be selected as the Swimlane field. (You can change which field bears this designation at any time after you've initially set up your Timeline by clicking on the Swimlane field header row, so don't worry about making the wrong selection).

Next, select the Start Date field and End Date field.

Curious about how your selections affect which records will be included on your Timeline? As you make your field selections, the number of plotted records will change. You can see how many records will be plotted at the bottom of the setup panel. This number is updated as you continue making selections.

To learn why some records will not be plotted, simply hover over the message.

Next, if you have any nested records in your workbook, you will need to decide how many levels you would like plotted in this Timeline view. For more granular data, you can choose to display multiple levels. For a birds-eye view, you can select only the highest level.

Selecting the Timeframe

Finally, decide how you would like to organize time within this Timeline view. Currently, Visor allows you to choose between a Week view or Sprint view. If you select Sprint view, you can set the length of your sprint and the start date of the first Sprint.

You can also customize which days of the week your team works.

There are a few ways you can edit a record's fields in the Timeline view. To change the start and end date Fields of a Record (but preserve the length of time between each date), simply drag the tile to a new place on your Timeline.

To change the start date, drag the left side of the tile. To change the End date, drag the right side of the chip.

Finally, to change the Assignee field, drag the tile to a new Swimlane.

Any changes you make to records by dragging their tiles will be synced throughout the other views within the workbook. If the edited fields are Connected fields, your edits can also be synced back to their Connected App (e.g., Jira).

Once you set up your first Timeline view, you may notice that some record tiles overlap. These tiles will have an orange dashed border, and there will be a notification in the workbook's toolbar telling you the total number of overlapping records.

In order to see your overlapping tiles, consider adding additional lanes to a swimlane. Click on the number next to the swimlane and select "Add row to lane" from the menu. You can drag any overlapping tiles into this new Lane without making changes to the value in that record's swimlane field. (Notice in the gif below that tile's field values stay the same.)

If you'd like to edit any of a record's fields that are not visible on the Timeline (e.g., fields other than the designated Swimlane field, the Start Date field, and the End Date field), simply click on the tile to pull up a detailed view of that record. From there, you can edit any of the record's details.

If you've created conditional formatting in other views (within the same folder) in your workbook, those same formatting options will be available to you in Timeline view.

To apply formatting to your Timeline, simply select the star icon next to the field name in the "Conditional formatting" tab.

For example, you can select the Assignee field for Swimlane field, but apply formatting based on the Status field. Record tiles would be grouped by assignee, but formatted according to their status.

For more on conditional formatting, check out the Conditional formatting page in our Help Guide.