Read one roadmap in different ways
Free
Use a detailed timeline to plan individual activities and a compact or summarized timeline to discuss the whole release. A saved view lets you return to the arrangement that answers your question. Each view reads the same plan, so you can keep several perspectives without maintaining duplicate roadmaps.
The examples below share seven activities, two teams and two milestones. Move a bar in one and the other views follow. Open in Tidigar opens your own copy to try the settings.
Activity titles fixed on the left
Use one row per activity with its title in a fixed column on the left. The column gives every row a predictable reading position. It is useful when readers need to scan activity names before comparing their dates, or when several bars start close together.
Open Customize View… from the saved views menu. Choose one activity per row with titles on the left, and group and color by Team. The title column identifies the work; the dated part of the timeline locates it in time.
Activity titles beside the bars
Keep one activity per row, but place its title beside its bar. This puts the name near the dates it describes and leaves more room for the timeline itself.
Choose one activity per row and text beside the bar. Short names work well here. When a title is close to the edge, try a wider date range or another text placement rather than shortening the underlying activity name just for this view.
Security review and Design the experience both start after Agree the brief. Build the release waits for both. Changing the label arrangement keeps those relationships and dates.
A compact overview by team
Compact mode lets activities share rows. Here, the four Product activities fit on one activity row and the three Release activities fit on another, because their dates do not overlap within each team. The milestones have their own rows above the teams.
Choose compact activity rows and group by Team. When activities overlap, Tidigar uses additional rows within the group so their bars stay distinct. Use a detailed view when you need to scan every activity's name.
Summarize phases within each team
For a release discussion, keep Team as the grouping and choose Phase under Summarize by. Each team now has Preparation and Delivery summaries, with a bracket spanning the work in each phase. Select a summary's title or disclosure arrow to fold its activities away; select it again to expand them.
This view also turns on Show reference keys, Milestones beside their work and Show milestones as flags. OR-9 Release complete appears beside OR-7 Roll out, the activity it waits for. OR-8 Review meeting has a fixed date and stays in the separate milestones group.
Choose Open in Tidigar on this example, then collapse Delivery in your copy. It folds in both teams. Release complete stays visible below its summary, so the release date is still readable in the overview. Expand Delivery to inspect the individual work again. The embedded timeline above lets you drag work, but its summary disclosure controls are available in the editor.
Save views for different questions
- Open the saved views menu, choose New View… and name it for its purpose, such as Release overview.
- Open Customize View… and choose grouping, activity rows, text placement and any summaries or filters.
- Choose Save changes to keep the new settings, or Revert Changes to return to the stored settings.
- Create another named view for a different question. If you started by customizing All activities, use Save as View… to name and keep that arrangement.
You can keep an overview for presentations and a detailed view for planning. To show a saved view on an office screen, see Screen links. For views limited to one phase, see Organize activities into phases.
How timeline views work in detail
The following rules explain what changes the plan, what a saved view contains and what happens when the overview hides detail.
The plan, the saved view and your own reading state
Activity names, dates, dependencies, dimension values and reference keys belong to the plan. Editing them from any view changes the same records. Dragging a bar therefore affects other views too, and may move dependent work even when that work is hidden by the current filter.
A saved view stores how to read those records: grouping, coloring, filters and search, row and text layout, date range and scale options, summary dimension, milestone presentation and whether to show reference keys. Changing these settings gives you a working version; Save changes updates the stored view. Revert Changes restores its settings. It does not undo activity edits made while that view was open.
Which summaries you have collapsed is personal reading state. Tidigar remembers it locally, but it neither marks a saved view as modified nor becomes part of that view when you save it. This lets you inspect one phase without choosing how everyone else must read the plan. Each embedded example keeps its own view settings while plan edits stay synchronized.
Grouping, filtering and summarizing answer different questions
Grouping arranges activities by a dimension such as Team. Coloring can use that dimension or a different one. Neither creates a dependency. Filtering and search select the records you see; they do not delete the hidden work or disconnect its relationships.
Summaries are built from the activities that pass the current filters and search. Each bracket runs from its earliest activity start to its latest activity end, including any gaps. It describes a span of dates, rather than an amount of effort or continuous work. Filtering out an early or late activity can shorten that bracket without changing any activity's dates.
When you group by Team and summarize by Phase, a separate summary appears for each phase with visible work inside each team. If you group and summarize by the same dimension, the summary itself supplies the heading. Empty summaries are omitted; activities without a value for the summary dimension remain outside its summaries. Hide empty groups separately controls whether empty group headings remain.
Collapsing a summary value applies to every occurrence of that value in the timeline. Collapsing Delivery in Product therefore also collapses Delivery in Release. The shared phase value identifies what to fold, even though each team has a different bracket and different activities.
Folding a summary and dragging its bar have different effects
Folding hides the member activity rows while keeping their summary span. Arrows between hidden members disappear; relationships that leave or enter collapsed work can meet the summary instead. Expanding restores the individual rows and their arrows. The dependencies in the plan remain unchanged.
Dragging the bracket changes activity dates. It moves that summary's member activities through the roadmap's scheduling rules, and work that depends on them can follow outside the summary. In work-day planning, the move follows the work calendar. One undo returns the move.
Tidigar refuses the drag if any activity at the summary's earliest start already waits for another record. That predecessor determines when the summary can start; moving the predecessor or editing the individual activities makes the scheduling choice explicit. In this example, Product / Preparation starts with the independent Agree the brief and can move, while Product / Delivery starts with Build the release, which waits for earlier work, and cannot be dragged as a summary.
Milestones stay at their dates when their placement changes
Milestone display and placement are separate choices. You can hide milestones, show markers, include labels or use flags. Milestones beside their work places a non-fixed milestone beside the visible activity it depends on that ends last. Its date and dependencies still come from the plan; placement does not reschedule it.
A fixed milestone, or a milestone with no visible activity predecessor, stays in the milestones area. If filters hide its latest predecessor, a different visible predecessor can host it. This changes where it is drawn, not which predecessors it waits for. When its host's summary is collapsed, the milestone has a separate row below the summary. Its arrows are suppressed there to keep the overview readable and return when the summary expands.
Compact rows also reserve room through the date of a milestone placed beside its activity. This can require more rows than the activity bars alone would need. For how fixed and following milestone dates behave, read Two kinds of milestone.
Reference keys identify work across views
Set an activity's or milestone's Reference in its properties, then turn on Show reference keys in the view to display it before the title. Search and the dependency picker can find records by their keys even when the view does not show the keys. A reference is useful when a discussion or an external ticket needs a short name for the work.
The roadmap's Reference key prefix supplies suggested keys for new activities and milestones. With prefix OR, both record types share the numbering: the next suggestion follows the highest existing OR number. Changing the prefix does not rename existing keys. You can keep a key from another system instead, or leave it empty.
Keys are editable text and duplicates are allowed, with a warning: two people working offline may independently choose the same number. Keeping both preserves their work when the changes meet. A key therefore helps people find work but does not establish its identity or dependencies. Showing or hiding keys changes the view; editing a key changes the record and leaves its dates alone.
The date range and the available width both matter
The start and end dates in Customize View… define the timeline interval. Fit to screen fits that interval to the available width; it does not replace it with the dates of the filtered activities. After narrowing a view to one phase, choose a useful interval as well as the filter.
The timeline can extend its end to retain later visible work, milestones and periods. A saved range is therefore a framing choice rather than a rule that forbids work outside it. On a narrow screen, a long interval also leaves less room for labels. Choose a shorter interval, fixed titles or a more compact layout according to the question you need to answer.
For a complete roadmap to adapt, explore the example gallery.