Visor allows you to nest records to create parent + child relationships. This is valuable in cases where your data has lots of complexity, or where workbook collaborators transition between tactical and strategic work & reporting.

In this article, we’ll take a look at how to use and optimize your usage of nesting and levels shown to tell the most effective data story for you, your team, and your stakeholders.

Your data may have multiple levels of nesting, depending on how complex it is. Let’s take a look at some of the ways you can start to nest your data:

If you’re using Jira, you probably have nested data. Most teams use a combination of Epics, User Stories, Tasks, Subtasks, Bugs, and possibly more Issue Types. When you import your Jira Issues into Visor, you’ll be presented with the option to either Maintain nesting from Jira or Ignore nesting from Jira.

If you choose to maintain nesting, you’ll notice a combination of parent and child records appear in your workbook.

By default, each Epic is a parent of User Stories, Tasks, and Bugs (though you may have additional Issue Types that may be included in this list, unique to your organization).

Whether you’ve imported from Jira, another connected app, or are starting from scratch - you can manually nest records in Visor.

To use this feature, hover over the nesting level (left-most) column, click on the gripper icon, and drag a record to be a child of another record. Green indicators show where the target position will be as you drag the record.

When nested records already exist in your workbook, you’ll be able to quickly change the parent + child relationship for one or multiple records.

To use this feature, select the corresponding record cell for the parent field and type in the primary label for the new parent it should be a child of.

To update multiple records under a new parent, you can copy (ctrl/cmd + C) the value of the target parent value, highlight all the parent cells for the records you want to move, and paste (ctrl/cmd + V) the value.

You can update nesting in Table and Gantt views.

While using and updating nesting fundamentally affects the organization of your data, configuring levels shown helps you curate your view for yourself, your team, and/or your stakeholders. This feature is typically used when you’ve determined that you want to focus on a subset of complexity (typically higher levels are more strategic data, while lower levels are more tactical).

Table and Gantt views allow you to view all or a subset of all the levels which exist in your data. If you’re looking at Jira data, you may have one level dedicated to Epics, and subsequent levels dedicated to User Stories, Tasks, and Bugs. You might even have a further level dedicated to Subtasks.

Update levels shown to only display the levels you care about via following steps:

Since the timeline view is built for targeted analytics, it allows you to view one level at a time. Whether you want to gauge your tactical performance of individual User Stories or are reporting to executives on the strategic progress of your Epics - you’ll be able to easily select the level that makes the most impact on your audience.

Update levels shown to display the level you care about through via following steps: