How to Use Nesting and Levels Shown
How to Use Nesting and Levels Shown

How to Use Nesting and Levels Shown

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Learn how to use nesting and levels shown to tell the right story
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Overview

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

Nesting

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:

Import nested records from Jira

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.

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

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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).

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While Visor is flexible enough to allow you to modify nested relationships or use a completely flat hierarchy for your Jira Issues, please note that these changes will not reflect in Jira if you sync back to it. Additionally, if you import after making any changes, they may be reverted to reflect the original hierarchy set in Jira.

Nesting records by dragging

Whether you’ve imported from Jira, any other 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.

Nesting records using the “Parent” field

When nested records already existing 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.

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For more information on the Parent Field, check out our glossary.

Levels Shown

While using and update 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).

Configuring levels shown in Table & Gantt views

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 for Epics, a second level dedicated for User Stories, Tasks, and Bugs. And you might even have a third level dedicated for Subtasks.

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

  1. Open the View menu
  2. Click on the Levels Shown menu item
  3. Update the selections in that menu
  4. Save the levels shown settings

Configuring levels shown in the Timeline view

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 strategic progress of your Epics - you’ll be able to easily select the level that makes the most impact to your audience.

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

  1. Open the View menu
  2. Click on the Levels Shown menu item
  3. Update the selection in that menu
  4. Save the level shown settings

Ready to try this in Visor?

👋🏼
Written by @Jonathan Slavuter

Updated November 16th, 2022

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