My name is Ryan MacGillis, and I’m a Customer Support Specialist here at Planview AgilePlace. A lot of the questions we receive are from people who want to get the most out of Planview AgilePlace’s features — that’s where I come in. Periodically, I’ll be blogging about some of the most frequently asked questions I hear. This Planview AgilePlace FAQ explains how board filters work.
Why Use Filters?
Board filters become increasingly useful as your kanban boards become more complex: Your team’s boards might get larger as your team grows, you might be actively working on several team boards, or you may be on a team that shares a board with other teams. On these more complex kanban boards, it’s harder to manually find a specific card or set of cards at a glance.
Say you have a member on your team, Dani, who is being spread too thin. You want to lessen her load by distributing some of her work to team members who have more bandwidth, so you look for all the cards to which she is currently assigned.
You could search through the whole board manually, but that would probably be frustrating — and on a large board, you might miss some. It’d be much easier if you could quickly see all the cards that are assigned to Dani.
How to Use Board Filters
Planview AgilePlace has a built-in filter for each kanban board on your account, which enables you to filter by whatever criteria you need — like assigned user. You can access the filter menu by clicking on the funnel icon located in the top-right corner of any board. Once you click it, you’ll be presented with various filtering options.
I recommend to start by clicking “Reset All” to clear anything that you may have entered previously, intentionally or by accident. Once you have cleared all previous filter options, you can begin making selections based on what you are looking for. Here’s the process you would take to see all the cards on a board that are assigned to Dani, from the example above:
- Click the funnel icon to open the filter menu (click “Reset All”).
- Navigate down to the “User” section.
- Find Dani and click the checkmark beside her name.
- Navigate back to the top of the filter menu. Here, you can choose to either “Highlight” the cards that match your criteria or “Show Only” cards that match your criteria.
Highlight vs. Show Only
“Highlight” will gray out all the cards that do not match your criteria, while keeping the cards that match highlighted (active). Here are all the cards assigned to Dani, in “Highlight” mode.
“Show Only” will hide all the cards that don’t match your criteria, and only show the cards that match. This option is really helpful if you have many cards on the board because it hides everything except exactly the cards you want to see. Here are all the cards assigned to Dani, seen in “Show Only” mode. With this view, you can easily redistribute Dani’s work to other members on the team.
Helpful Note
If you leave a filter on when you leave a board, it will still be on when you get back. It remembers the last filter you had selected, but this is specific to you. Remember to clear all previous filter options before beginning a new search.
More FAQs Coming Soon
Check back regularly to learn more about how to make the most of Planview AgilePlace.
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