Basic Terms

A "user" is someone with a Visor account. When someone is invited to view, comment on, or edit a workbook, they become a user within a workspace. Users can belong to multiple workspaces.

See also: Sharing & Permissions

A workspace is a collection of workbooks and the users who have access to them. In order to access any of the workbooks within a workspace, the user must be a member of that workspace and have at least viewer-level access to the workbook.

You can view all of the workbooks that you have access to within your current workspace here: https://app.visor.us/sheets

A workbook is effectively a "file" of data within Visor that can be displayed and formatted in different ways (see Views). Each workbook can contain multiple folders, and each folder can contain multiple views. There is no limit to the number of users who can view or edit a workbook, but a workbook can only belong to one workspace.

Users will find a list of all the workbooks they have access to on the Visor homepage.

Views are the ways in which the data in a workbook are displayed and are accessible through tabs at the bottom of a workbook. All views share the same main dataset and so a change to one should be reflected in all of them. You can use views to set up slices of your data by creating a View and then adding a filter.

There are currently four types of views in Visor: Table, Gantt, and Timeline. Users can switch between views or add new views within a workbook by using the tabs at the bottom of the window.

Records represent the main items in a workbook. In Table view and Gantt view, records are shown as rows. In the Timeline view, records are shown as tiles that users can drag.

Jira users typically have only one issue linked per record. In this case, records can be thought of as the equivalent of issues in Jira.

However, it is also possible for each record to link to multiple different items from other connected apps. For example, a record can link to both a Jira issue as well as a Salesforce contact, creating a custom relationship between data from multiple connected apps.

Users are also able to nest their records for easier data organization. (See Nesting for more information.)

Fields are the attributes of a record, and are displayed as columns in table view and Gantt view. Fields can also be seen in the pop up that appears when clicking on the bars in the canvas of the Gantt and Timeline views.

In Gantt view, users can select the fields they'd like to appear on the Gantt chart. While the primary label field controls how the records are plotted in Gantt view, users can also include additional fields to be displayed to the right of the primary label field.

Timeline View has a special Field called Swimlane Field. This field, combined with Start Date and End Date fields are how Visor plots the records on a Timeline.

To add a new field in Table view and Gantt view, scroll the fields all the way to the right and click the "Add field" link at the top. (It is not possible to add additional custom fields from Timeline view at this time).

A custom field is a field that contains an attribute of a record, but that attribute can only be saved in Visor (unlike connected fields, which sync back to connected apps).

Visor supports the following custom field types: Plain Text, Dropdown, Date, Date/Time, Time, and Number.

Connected fields contain data in Visor that is able to sync with a connected app. Connected fields will be editable in Visor if the connected app it came from supports editing.

As users edit connected fields in Visor, those changes will be saved in Visor for the next sync. A yellow indicator will appear on edited cells that have not yet synced. Once a sync occurs, the yellow indicator will disappear.

Nesting is an option that users have when importing Jira issues to Visor. Users are able to apply the same hierarchy that existed between issues in Jira to newly imported records in Visor. There is no limit to how many levels of nesting a user can apply to their records.

If a user does not elect to nest their Jira issues, all Jira issue types will be imported as "flat." Users can always nest records in a workbook manually, even if Nesting was not selected during an import.

In table view and Gantt view, arrows will appear next to any nested records in the primary label field.

Users can click these arrows to either display or hide that parent record's lower, nested records.

Timeline view can only display one Nesting level at a time; however, users can see if a record belongs to a parent record by clicking on the tile and reviewing its parent field attributes.

The Parent Field is a special field that appears automatically after nesting is established in a workbook, and it indicates which record is the parent of any nested record.

The Parent Field cannot be deleted once nesting has been established within a workbook, and there is no way to add the Parent Field without first establishing nesting.

See Nesting for more information.

The primary label field is the field that will be used to represent the name of a record. There can only be one Primary Label Field at a time, and the value in the primary label field will be used when displaying the records in Gantt view and Timeline view.

Users cannot delete or hide the primary label field. However, it can be renamed, or the primary label field designation can be changed to a different field.

To change which field is the primary label, click the header row in of the first column in Table view and select the option: "Change primary label."

A Cell is a specific unit of data at the intersection of a record and a field.

Conditional formatting is the ability to color-code and format the text of any dropdown fields. Conditional formatting also allows users to filter by the dropdown fields within a workbook, effectively allowing users to "hide" extraneous data depending on the audience for that view.

See also: Conditional Formatting

Visor supports a number of different user roles (currently: Owner, Editor, Commenter, and Viewer). To see what each permissions level provides access to, see our Sharing & Permissions page. To see what permissions levels your account has access to, see our Pricing Page.