Preview of SheetPlanner 3.0 Beta Features

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Posted by SheetPlanner
Feb 23, 2022 at 07:08 PM

We will release the 3.0 beta in the next few weeks.

Here is a preview of the upcoming features…

* Multiple sheets and tabs:
- Everyone can now use multiple sheets and tabs in a document.
- A sidebar is available to organize multiple sheets.
- Sheets, Notes, and Links can be displayed in a new tab.
- These was previously only available to paid users; now also available in free mode.

* Sync:
- Saving to iCloud Drive is now supported. New documents are saved in iCloud Drive by default, but can be saved elsewhere if desired.
- When saved to iCloud Drive, sharing options are available. See Share ▸ Share File menu, and the Share toolbar button.
- Detects when a document is changed on two or more computers at once, and merges the changes, to avoid one overwriting the other’s.
- Now uses Quick Look preview and thumbnail app extensions to dynamically provide those to the Finder, to avoid conflicts when editing a document on multiple Macs.
- Quick Look previews can be zoomed and scrolled, though are static snapshots of the window content.
- Added support for Mac-specific bookmarks for file links, so finding a file on one Mac won’t invalidate the link on another Mac.
- The showing state of notes and links is now also Mac-specific.
- Changed the way the outline hierarchy is restored when loading a document, to minimize changes needed to be saved, thus reducing conflicts when syncing.

* Collaboration selection:
- When another Mac makes changes to a document, the changed cells are briefly highlighted.
- Added a command to Show/Hide Highlights. When shown, all cells that have been edited are highlighted with the person’s color. When hidden, cells are only highlighted when changed remotely.
- When two or more people are editing the same document at the same time, the other people’s selections are displayed as thin lines, using their highlight colors.

* People column:
- Added a standard People column, hidden by default, that is a List-type column pre-populated with the names of people collaborating on a document.
- When the People column is displayed, it works the same as other List columns: click the menu button to show a menu of people, or type a name. The cell also displays the selected person’s color; this color is used to highlight their changes.
- Can add and remove custom people via the Inspector.
- Collaborators and custom people use different icons in the People column.
- In the Column Inspector, the color assigned to each person can be changed.
- Also in the Inspector, the names can be edited, e.g. to use a shorter name.
- The Inspector also includes an option to choose multiple people, or only one.
- When one or more people have been assigned to a row via the People column, and a notification is set for a date column, now only those people are notified.
- Updated the Project Plan and Sales Pipeline templates to use the People column instead of a custom List column.

* Cell Inspector:
- When a cell that has been changed is selected, the Cell Inspector now displays information about it, including:
- The date and time the cell was last changed.
- The highlight color and name of the person who made the change.
- The name of the computer where the change was made.

* Smart filters:
- Added the ability to filter on Row attributes, like whether a row is a task (has a duration) or milestone (no duration), is a parent (has sub-rows) or a child (no rows within), is unchanged, was changed by you, or was changed by someone else, etc.
- Fixed the Note filtering to properly support searching within notes, from start of notes, etc.
- Smart filters now support filtering on the People column.

* More compact documents:
- The SheetPlanner document is now a single file, instead of a package (a folder of files presented as one file).
- This makes syncing faster and more reliable, in addition to taking up less space on disk, among other benefits.
- Note that documents opened in version 3.0 and later won’t be able to be opened in version 2.0.6 or earlier.
- Documents saved by SheetPlanner 3 use the file extension “.sp”.

* Debug:
- Added a command in the Debug menu to open the diagnostic log file, that records information to help debug the app (it is replaced each day).
- Also added a command to open the Console, which logs that and other Apple framework detritus.
- Added Debug menu options to add the computer name or app edition name to the person name. Useful to test the People column without multiple people.

* Other changes:
- On macOS 11 and later, the window now has the title above the toolbar, instead of to the left, so toolbar buttons are spaced out instead of scrunched to the right.
- When a cell is selected, the color picker is now updated to reflect the text color of that cell.
- The Inspector no longer scrolls to the top when changing the cell selection etc.
- When a document is saved, its print settings are saved as the default.
- When a template is loaded, the default print settings are loaded.
- When opening a template, the sheet name now defaults to the template name.
- When adding a sheet to an existing document, the sheet name has a number appended to make it unique, if necessary.
- As a special case, adding a blank sheet uses the name “Sheet”, with a number if needed.
- When copying a Topic cell with notes and/or links, those are now also included when pasting into a document.
- When opening a document on a different computer, the first sheet is selected by default, instead of none.
- The Month and Year view headers now better adapt between light and dark modes.

Posted by Amontillado
Feb 24, 2022 at 02:14 AM

Wow - sounds like you’ve invested a lot of care in your work. Very nice.

Posted by SheetPlanner
Feb 26, 2022 at 03:13 AM

SheetPlanner 3.0 Beta invites are going out tonight via TestFlight…..

Posted by SheetPlanner
Apr 14, 2022 at 10:42 AM

All,
Expect a public release of SheetPlanner 3.0 in the next 2 weeks.
Peter

SheetPlanner wrote:
SheetPlanner 3.0 Beta invites are going out tonight via TestFlight…..

Posted by SheetPlanner
May 11, 2022 at 03:53 AM

All,
On the verge of releasing SheetPlanner 3.0. One more build and then we will submit to Apple and Setapp.

Bonus feature is that in addition to sync and collaboration via iCloud Drive (works just like Pages, Keynote, Numbers), we have also added sync via DropBox, OneDrive and Google Drive.

Can’t wait to get this out there.

Getting sync done is critical to releasing an iOS, iPad OS version. If people are going to have SheetPlanner on multiple devices, they will need to sync.

Peter

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