A common request from our user community, especially professional service firms, is to have a simplified output/presentational view of a grid that can be used in presentations to prospect-clients, or shared with clients as a high-level overview; essentially, allowing you to show off the depth of a process or methodology. Some users have even expressed the desire to print out their treasured methodologies as large format posters to adorn their office walls … a great idea!
As always, the community spoke and we listened; we can now introduce our latest new feature: allowing for the customised output of your grids!
In other words, you can now save a grid as a PDF file (for image manipulation), or you can send the tailored view to print. Here’s a quick overview of how it works.
When in a grid, look for the PDF icon button in the action button bar. Click on this and you will be taken to a preview page of the grid. An off-canvas panel will open on the right hand side of the page. In this panel, you will see all the visible feature options (such as progress bars, flags, assigned members etc) of a grid, as organized by the core visual aspects: Grid, Stage, Theme and Element.
You can decide which information you want visible on the output by unticking/ticking accordingly (you will see automatically on the grid preview how this will look).
Once you click the ‘Save as PDF/print‘ button, a print dialogue window will open. Here you can select your local printer or select to ‘Save as PDF’, usually a dropdown option depending on your operating system. We recommend orientating to landscape when outputting the view, but of course it depends on the format of your specific grid. You can then play around with scale to fit this to a single page; by example, some of the larger grids we use, have had to scale down to 20% in order to fit on one page.
Of course, this PDF file can then be used flexibly – to create related image files (.jpgs, .pngs) – to be dropped in emails, Powerpoint presentations etc.
For best results we recommend using browsers Chrome, Edge or Firefox.
And if that wasn’t enough …
We have also shoe-horned in another feature with this sprint as we felt we really needed to get it out as soon as we could!
With the launch of the new dashboard feature last week, we realised that not being able to filter by status on the Grids table was sub-optimal. So, now you can!
Now, in the Grids tab, when you trigger the dropdown filter on the ‘Status’ column, you can decide what you want to show; another step forward in bringing the visual dashboards to life.