Edit a Swimlane Chart

This article is intended to walk a user through the process of editing a Swimlane chart. If you have not done so already, please read through:

Create a New Chart

to create the blank Swimlane chart which we’ll learn how to customize and alter in this article.

The menu on the left gives a series of drop-down menus to begin segmenting your data in the visualization. The choices in the drop-down menus correspond to the columns in your spreadsheet.

For example, when using this spreadsheet:

Here are the options available in the drop-down menus:

Now we can start manipulating our visualization!

The first drop-down menus come as a pair for START/END DATES. These will determine the horizontal lengths of the bars.

As a note, dates from the spreadsheet must be in “YYYY-MM-DD” or “YY-mmm-DD” format. Note that "MM/DD/YYY" is not a a valid option.

As a default, tick marks show up to mark each year, each bar begins and ends on a year, and the labels at the beginning and end also display the beginning and ending year. Either of these options can be separately altered to change the precision of the bar lengths, bar labels, or tick mark intervals to every YEAR, QUARTER or MONTH (or DAY for the bar lengths or labels).

By clicking on either of the dialogue boxes below START/END DATES, the start and end of the range of swimlane can be altered.

For example, shifting the start date past some of the start will cause some of them to condense.

Clicking on any of the bars brings up all the information for that row.

Next up are the COLOR, GROUP, and SORT options, which allow us to visually associate different bars. COLOR does so without changing the vertical positioning of the lanes.

The COLOR option comes with default values for the colors. However, these can either be altered two different ways. One is by clicking on the color square, bringing up the color selector tool:

The other is by manually entering a comma separated list of hex color codes:

GROUP and SORT also allow us to visually associate different bars, but unlike COLOR, they do so by changing the vertical positioning of the lanes.

SORT allows additional functionality by having the option to ADD A SORT.

Multiple sorts orders by the first attribute given, and then by the next attribute. Additional SORT BY options can be added to have more than 1 or 2.

The last thing we’ll add to our visualization is data labels. There are two options: BAR LABEL and LANE LABEL. BAR LABEL adds a label inside the bar, while LANE LABEL adds one at the left side of the swimlane.

There is one remaining option at our disposal: FILTER. Filtering our data won’t change the relative placement or appearance of any bars, but instead will remove data we’d like to filter out.

PADDING has no effect on the data, but refers to the vertical spacing between lanes. Increasing the padding increases the spacing, and decreasing the padding decreases the spacing.