Conditional Import for OnePager Pro Desktop for Version 6.1

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Overview

1) The Conditional Import Filters feature supports imports from all locations and configurations of Microsoft Project source plans including those from your computer, from the cloud; as a single source plan, Integrated Master Schedules (IMS), or multiple separate Microsoft Project source plans.

2) This article provides details on the use of the Conditional Import Filters feature for OnePager Pro (OPP) Desktop edition.

(1) First, we’ll provide information on how to create Conditional Import Filters rules using the Conditional Import Rules form.
(2) Then, we'll cover a couple of examples on how you might use the Condition Import Filters feature in your every day use of OnePager in preparation for your schedule presentations and discussions.

Adding a Filter Rule to the Conditional Import Rules Form

1) The Conditional Import Rules form resembles to the Conditional Formatting form in look and function. In this form you can add, copy, change, and delete Conditional Import Filters rules. The form is accessed from the OnePager choices (OPC) form as shown below:

P60-7 18 1 2-60-(1AA)-03072017.png
a) The Conditional Import Rules form is shown in its initial blank state above. The rules entered become part of any project view subsequently created or updated and are saved with the project view. If you later, create or update a snapshot using a flag field, OPP saves the flag field and clear the Conditional Import Filters rules.
b) Conditional Import Filter rules are typically entered when a project view is first created in the NEW workflow.
c) After a project view is created, rules can be added later for the UPDATE workflow via the OnePager Choices form invoked either from the OnePager Start form or the Project View Editor (Custom Update… button. These workflows are described later in the examples accompanying this article.

2) With the Custom Import Rules form visible and blank, click the Add Rule button to create a new empty row as shown below:

P60-7 18 1 1-60-(1AA)-03032017.png
a) There are five cells shown for the new rule row above. The first two cells are used as follows:
i) The first two cells are used as selection cells.
ii) The first left-most cell, when clicked, allows you to use the Copy Rule(s) or the Delete Rule(s) buttons.
iii) The second cell from the left is a checkbox used to allow you to activate or deactivate the rule. If the checkbox is unchecked, OPP does not apply the rule when performing the import function.
b) The Field cell of a row (third from the left) has a dropdown menu that allows you to select a Microsoft Project source plan field to use in creating the selected criterion. When the dropdown menu is selected, the Field cell looks something like this:
P60-7 18 1 1-60-(2AA)-03032017.png
c) When a Microsoft Project source plan field is selected, the name is displayed in the Field cell of the new Custom Import rule row.
d) The look of the rest of the new Conditional Import Filters rule depends on the type of the Microsoft Project source plan field selected. These types are discussed next.

3) Date and Numeric Fields – When Microsoft Project date or numeric types are selected in the Field cell of the rule row, the Operator field dropdown provides the options shown below:

P60-7 18 1 1-60-(3AA)-03032017.png
a) These are the conventional six (6) logical operators used consistently in OPP for date and numeric types. They are the same Operators used in OPP for Conditional Formatting. See the article at Conditional Formatting Overview for OnePager Pro for complementary details on the use of these logical operators.
b) When the logical statement evaluates to TRUE on the selected Field in a Microsoft Project source plan row, the row is imported. Otherwise it is skipped.

4) Text Fields – When Microsoft Project text types are entered in the Field cell of the Conditional Import Filters rule row, the Operator field dropdown provides the options shown below:

P60-7 18 1 1-60-(4AA)-03032017.png
a) These are the conventional four (4) logical operators used consistently in OPP for the text type. They are the same Operators used in OPP for Conditional Formatting. See the article at Conditional Formatting Overview for OnePager Pro for complementary details on the use of these logical operators.
b) When the logical statement evaluates to TRUE on the selected Field in a Microsoft Project source plan row, the row is imported. Otherwise it is skipped.

5) Boolean Fields – When Microsoft Project Boolean types are entered in the Field cell of the Conditional Import Filters rule row, the Operator field dropdown provides the options shown below:

P60-7 18 1 1-60-(5AA)-03032017.png
a) These are the two (2) conventional Boolean logical operators used consistently in OPP for the Boolean type. They are the same Operators used in OPP for Conditional Formatting. See the article at Conditional Formatting with Boolean Fields for OnePager Pro for compeimentary details on the use of these logical operators.
b) Boolean types are a special case as the operator and the value in OPP are combined into one cell of the Conditional Import Filters rule row - the Operator cell.
c) When the selected Field is TRUE (or Yes) in a Microsoft Project source plan row, the row is imported. Otherwise it is skipped.

6) Flag1 Through Flag20 Fields – OPP treats Microsoft Project fields from Flag1 through Flag20 as Boolean types in the same way as described in the previous sub-section.

P60-7 18 1 1-60-(6AA)-003032017.png

7) We want to emphasize the flexibility that Conditional Import Filters adds to the way you can import rows from your Microsoft Project source plan. You can formulate sets of Conditional Import Filters rules to controls imports using all available types of Microsoft Project fields and use operators that let you select ranges of values and more complicated combinations of criteria.

Editing an Existing Filter Rule in the Conditional Import Rules Form

8) Suppose you’ve composed several Conditional Import Filters rules in an open Conditional Import Rules form as shown below:

P60-7 18 1-60-(5BB)-03022017.png
a) Now further suppose, after reviewing these two rules, that you realize that you can not be able to capture any tasks/milestones that happen to Start on 12/31/2015 because the current rule is based on the less than logical Operator.
b) To make the change in the Operator cell, click on the cell’s contents which highlights the cell in blue and reveals the dropdown menu button which you should click. When you do the Conditional Import Rules form should look like this:
P60-7 18 1 1-60-(7AA)-03032017.png
c) To change the rule, click the desired Operator in the dropdown menu, in this case the less than or equal Operator, and it is displayed in the Operator cell of the second rule as shown here:
P60-7 18 1 1-60-(8AA)-03032017.png
d) Any Field, Operator, or Value cell can be edited in this way. Additionally, the On cell can be toggled to control the Conditional Import Filters rule's participation in the import process. Finally, you can switch between the two radio buttons at the top of the form in order to change the relationship among the rules from OR to AND or vice versa.
e) The edits described above can be made to the Conditional Import Rules form regardless of the OPC mode in which you are working (i.e., NEW and UPDATE). Also, you access the Conditional Import Rules form from the OPC form as many times as needed to accomplish your presentation goal. OPP saves the content of the last edit you make to the Conditional Import Rules form.
f) When satisfied with the structure of your import rules, click the OK button at the bottom of the form to return to the OPC form. Now you are ready to create a new project view.

Copying an Existing Filter Rule in the Conditional Import Rules Form

9) The Copy Rule(s) button is provided in the Conditional Import Rules form to facilitate the creation of additional rules.

a) To copy a rule to create a new rule, first select the rule row from which you wish to copy as shown below:
P60-7 18 1 1-60-(9AA)-03032017.png
b) Once the desired row is selected, clicking the Copy Rule(s) button copies the contents of the rule selected as indicated by the highlighted left-most cell in the desired rule as shown below:
P60-7 18 1 1-60-(10AA)-03032017.png
c) At this point you can edit the copied row in the manner described previously. When you are finished, the new set of three rule rows can look like this:
P60-7 18 1 1-60-(11AA)-03032017.png
d) When satisfied with the structure of your import rules, click the OK button at the bottom of the form to return to the OPC form. Now you are ready to create a new project view.

Deleting an Existing Filter Rule in the Conditional Import Rules Form

10) There are times when a particular Conditional Import Filters rule no longer serves its purpose. You can select the rule row to be deleted and click the Delete Rule(s) button.

a) The process for deleting a rule parallels the process for copying a rule row in that the you must select the desired row to delete by clicking the left-most cell in that rule’s row.
b) Once the selection is made, click the Delete Rule(s) button and OPP first shows a warning message asking if you really want to delete the rule row as shown below:
P60-7 18 1 1-60-(12)-09272016.png
c) If you select the No option, OPP abandons the rule deletion operation and the warning message disappears leaving the selected rule row still selected.
d) If you select the Yes option, OPP removes the warning message, delete the selected rule row, and leave the Conditional Import Rules form showing the remaining rule rows, if any.
e) When satisfied with the structure of your import rules, click the OK button at the bottom of the form to return to the OPC form.

Switching from Flag Fields to New Conditional Import Filters Rules

11) When you click the NEW button, the OPC form appears as shown below. The process for building a new project view with Conditional Import Filters is the same with the exception that instead of using flag field from your Microsoft Project source plan you can, instead, invoke the Conditional Import Rules form from the OPC form as shown below:

P60-7 18 1 2-60-(1AA)-03072017.png
a) In the illustration above, in the Task Selection section of the form, the Select task by custom filter radio button is clicked. This action brings up the Conditional Import Rules form also shown above.
b) At this point you can Add Rules to the form, Copy Rules, Delete Rules, or edit existing rules.

Switching from Conditional Import Filters Rules to Flag Fields or Selecting all Tasks

12) If you subsequently decide after composing one or more Conditional Import Filters rules and clicking OK on the Conditional Import Rules form that you want to use flag fields instead, you can revert back to either of the two other Task Selection options provided in the OPC form shown above.

a) To do this, click either of the other two radio buttons to Select all tasks, or Select task with ‘Yes’ in field:
b) When you click the Select all tasks button there is no further action you need to take on the OPC form.
c) However, if you click the Select tasks with ‘Yes’ in field: you need to select a field from your Microsoft Project source plan as shown below:
P60-7 18 1 1-60-(13)-09272016.png
d) In these circumstances where you’ve switched from using Conditional Import Filters rules to either selecting all tasks, or selecting tasks using a flag field, OPP discards any Conditional Import Filters rules associated with the project view.

Adding, Editing, Copying, and Deleting Conditional Import Filters Rules

13) Managing Conditional Import Filters rules was discussed in previous sub-sections of this article. Please follow the reference links provided below for details on adding, editing, copying, and deleting of Conditional Import Filters rules:

a) Adding a new rule: Adding a Filter Rule to the Conditional Import Rules Form.
b) Editing an existing rule: Editing an Existing Filter Rule in the Conditional Import Rules Form.
c) Copying a rule: Copying an Existing Filter Rule in the Conditional Import Rules Form.
d) Deleting a rule: Deleting an Existing Filter Rule in the Conditional Import Rules Form.

A Simple Example Using Conditional Import

In this section and the one to follow, we’ll provide a couple of examples of a workflow that you might find most useful. First we’ll provide a simple example and then extend it to a more advance use of the workflow.

Setup

1) Suppose you have a situation where you want to focus the attention of your audience on a particular set of tasks that have the following attributes:

a) Where tasks/milestones start on or after October 1, 2015 but no later than December 31, 2015.
b) Where swimlanes represent the Phases of the project
c) Where the two text columns represent the Start Dates and the Finish Dates of each displayed task respectively.
d) And where the Legend is organized by Resource Name.

2) Let’s further suppose that we are going to use the BlueGrass Project 2J-303-PMO Microsoft Project source plan as input to OnePager Pro and we want to use the Single Project View Gantt View – Detailed Template.

3) To begin with, the source plan looks like this:

P60-7 18 1 1-60-(14-1)-05092017.png

4) Before we launch OnePager Pro Desktop, the Main tab of the Template used for this example looks like this:

P60-7 18 1 1-60-(15-1)-05092017.png

5) If we launched OnePager Pro Desktop from the desktop icon with the above Template as the current Template, the tasks and milestones included in the project view would be those associated with Yes in the Flag20 field in the source plan above. This is not what we want so we first have to change the task and milestone selection criteria using the Conditional Import Filters feature as we’ll show next.

Changing the Task and Milestone Selection Criteria

6) With the conditions established in the sub-section above, let’s go ahead and launch OnePager Pro Desktop from the desktop icon which accesses the OnePager Start form as shown below:

P60-7 18 1 2-60-(16-1)-05222017.png

7) Next, we’ll click the NEW button which accesses the abbreviated OnePager Choices (OPC) form shown here:

P60-7 18 1 2-60-(16AA-1)-05222017.png
a) Click the Select… button which brings up the Windows Open form.
b) Use the Open form to select the Microsoft Project source plan you need and click Open in the Windows Open form.
c) OPP Desktop retrieves the selected source plan where you can fill in the required fields of the OPC form so that it looks like the form shown here:
P60-7 18 1 1-60-(17-1)-05092017.png

8) We’ve gone ahead and confirmed that we have the correct source plan and we’ve filled in the Title of New Project View. We see that the Task Selection criteria is based on the contents of the Flag20 field, and we don’t want this field to be used. We have two ways to invoke the Conditional Import Filters feature and we’ll explain each below:

Using the OnePager Choices Form to Create Conditional Import Filters

9) For this first technique, click on the Select tasks by custom filter radio button, which brings up the Conditional Import Rules form as shown below:

P60-7 18 1 2-60-(18AA-1)-05222017.png

10) Next, we’ll enter the two Conditional Import Filters we specified in the previous subsection and make sure the All of the following are true radio button is selected so the Conditional Import Rules form looks like this when we are done:

P60-7 18 1 1-60-(19-1)-05092017.png

11) From here we could go ahead and click the OK button on the Conditional Import Rules form and, once back at the OPC form, go ahead and create the project view. However, before we do that we want to show the alternative way to enter Conditional Import Filters rules.

Using the Template to Create Conditional Import Filters

12) To illustrate this second technique let’s roll back to the OPC form we saw above and notice that the checkbox labeled Show field mappings is checked and the button below the checkbox is called Next>. Now click the Next> button which takes you to the second page of the OPC form which looks like this:

P60-7 18 1 1-60-(20-1)-05092017.png

13) Next, click the Edit current template… button which accesses the current Template as shown below. Then, navigate to the Main tab as we have done here and note the button titled Add/edit conditional import filter…:

P60-7 18 1 1-60-(21-1)-05092017.png

14) When the Add/edit conditional import filter… button is clicked, the Conditional Import Rules form appears and you can enter the two rules we specified in for this example as we’ve shown below:

P60-7 18 1 1-60-(22-1)-05092017.png

Creating the Project View

15) After entering the two Conditional Import Filters rules, as shown above, click the OK button on the Conditional Import Rules form and then the Save and Use button at the bottom of the Template form.

16) These actions takes you back to the second page of the OPC form, shown earlier; where you can click the Create new project view button and OnePager Pro creates the project view as shown here:

P60-7 18 1 1-60-(23-1)-05092017.png

Editing the Project View

17) Finally, we need to add the two text columns specified to show Start and Finish dates.

18) This final requirement is implemented by using the Text Column feature (insert link here). When these actions are taken the project view looks like this:

P60-7 18 1 1-60-(24-1)-05092017.png

An Advanced Example Using Conditional Import

1) The advanced workflow example presented in this section on Conditional Import Filters rules is a continuation of the example in the previous section.

2) If you haven’t read or reviewed the simple example, we suggest that you do so before reading on in this section.

Continuation of Simple Example

3) What we intend to show you in this section is how to proceed from the creation of the project view in the previous section through successive edits and replacements to get to a project view that is perfect for a specific schedule conversation.

4) To set the stage, let’s establish some further guidance for the final visual presentation:

a) It needs to be very focused on the apparent trouble spot; say with the Prime contractor just for example.
b) There needs be as few tasks as possible so as to keep the audience’s focus on the real project management issue.
c) The presentation of the schedule issues needs be on one page.

5) Given the above guidance, we need to restructure the project view from the previous section. Of course, we want to do this in the most efficient way so that it what we describes in the next sub-section.

Using Conditional Import Filters to Update a Project View through Replacement

6) Looking back at the project view from the previous sub-section, we see that it contains tasks from all the Resources available during the time interval we specified in the original set of Conditional- Import rules. Our guidance says that we want to focus more on the Prime contractor. So, we’ll use the Conditional Import Filters feature to refine our import criteria and replace the project view with tasks/milestones that meet the Start criteria and the Resource-Names criteria we need.

7) To modify the Conditional Import Filters rules do the following steps:

a) First we go to the project view and bring up the PVP form at the Main tab.
b) Next, we click the Add/edit conditional import filter… button to bring up the Conditional Import Rules form.
c) Then, we use the Add Rule button to make a row for the third rule and compose the third rule to specify Resource Names in the Field column, an equal sign in the Operator column, and the word Prime in the Value column.
d) When you are done adding the new (third) rule, the forms looks like this:
P60-7 18 1 1-60-(25-1)-05092017.png

8) Now do the following steps:

a) Click the OK button on the Conditional Import Rules form. This closes the form and take you back to the PVP form’s Main tab.
b) Here, click the Apply button only. This applies the change to the project view but keep the PVP’s Main tab open.
c) Before doing anything else, go to the Project View Editor’s (PVE) tool bar and select the Data tab. When you are finished with these steps, the PVE and the PVP Main tab looks like this:
P60-7 18 1 1-60-(26-1AA)-05092017.png

9) The last step in this workflow is to click the Replace Snapshot button which is the left-most button on the Data tab tool bar. This is the action that tells OnePager Pro to update the project view by re-importing the source data with task selection controlled by the three rules now active in the Conditional Import Rules form.

10) When the OnePager Pro replace process completes, the project view is honed to not only restrict the start dates but also to restrict the Resource Names in the chart, like this:

P60-7 18 1 1-60-(27-1)-05092017.png

Summary of First Project View Replacement Iteration

11) To summarize what we’ve done we’ve accomplished the following:

a) Used the original project view in conjunction with the Conditional Import Rules form to specify an additional rule that further narrows the tasks in the chart.
b) Used the Replace Snapshot button to tell OnePager Pro display only this refined set of tasks.

Second Project View Replacement Iteration

12) The project view we created above still isn’t quite ready for our schedule conversation. Looking at it closely, we probably don’t need to focus on any tasks/milestones that the Prime contractor has completed. So, in this next iteration let’s modify our Conditional Import Filters to just bring in those tasks/milestones that are less than 100 percent complete.

13) We’ll use the same sequence of steps that were used in the first replacement iteration we described above.

a) In the open PVP form, click the button to bring up the Conditional Import Rule form and add a fourth rule restricting to tasks/milestones that are less than 100 percent complete. The form looks like this when we are done adding the rule:
P60-7 18 1 1-60-(28-1)-05092017.png
b) With the above rule added, click the OK button in the Conditional Import Rules form and after it closes, click the Apply button on the bottom of the PVP form’s Main tab.
c) The appearance of the PVE is like this:
P60-7 18 1 1-60-(29-1)-05092017.png
d) The last step is to click the Replace Snapshot button on the OnePager Pro Data tab tool bar. OnePager performs the snapshot replacement and the project view looks like this:
P60-7 18 1 1-60-(30-1)-05092017.png

Summary of Second Project View Replacement Iteration

14) The project view in the illustration above now meets all the Start, Resource Name, and %Complete criteria to support the schedule conversation.

15) This was all done by an iterative workflow that couples updates to the Conditional Import Rules with the Replace Snapshot button on the OnePager Pro tool bar’s Data tab.

16) All that needs to be done now is to copy the project view into the media to be used for the schedule conversation.

Some Additional Comments on this Workflow

17) It’s important to remember for this workflow that you always want to REPLACE the single snapshot in the project view. We advise against ADDING a snapshot as you refine your rules because this can result in empty rows for tasks that were present under a previous set of rules but are now absent.

18) If you want to begin the workflow by OPENING a previously-created project view, it is essential, as mentioned above, that there is a clear and viable path from the project view to its source plan(s). You can confirm this and fix any problems by clicking the Selected Files button on the Data tab.

Related Links

Basic Workflows (Portal)

Conditional Formatting (Portal)

Using the OnePager "Data" Tab's "Selected file(s)" Button

OnePager Express Import of Data from Microsoft Excel

Understanding Project Views and Snapshots for OnePager Pro

Understanding Project Views and Snapshots for OnePager Express

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