Saved views and images

Saved views

A saved view remembers how you were looking at a map in Visualise mode:

• the visualisation mode
• what the map is drawn from: its connections, which nodes are left out and, for a step in a reveal, which connections are left out
• the Visibility filter
• size, colour and the Settings tab
• zoom and position
• which of the legends and the About this map panel are open or collapsed.

It never copies or changes the map’s data. Everyone in your organisation can see and use a map’s saved views.

Save

The save buttons are in the toolbar’s Views group. Hover over a button to see what it does.

• With no views yet, there’s one button: Save view (the disk).
• Once a view exists, there are two:
  • The disk overwrites the view that’s loaded. Its tooltip names the view, such as Update "default".
  • Save as a new view (the plus) adds another view.

Neither asks for a name. The first view is called “default”, then “view 2”, “view 3” and so on.

Switch, rename and delete

With two or more views, the Views group shows a picker (Load a saved view…), with a pencil to rename the loaded view and a bin to delete it. Deleting asks you to confirm. With only one view, there’s nothing to pick: it’s always loaded.

Drag a view by the grip beside it to change the order. The new order is saved for everyone, and every view becomes a step in it (see below). Cmd + Shift + → or ← (Ctrl on Windows) loads the next or previous view in the picker.

The app remembers the last view you loaded on each map, in this browser.

Build a map up in steps

Views can be steps that build a map up bit by bit, such as “just us”, then “plus our clients”, then “plus their funders”. Each step leaves some nodes and connections out. A step’s place is its position in the picker: steps come first, in order, then any views that aren’t steps.

Going from one step to another doesn’t start the layout again. The nodes already on the map move to make room for what the step adds, so you can see the map grow. Dragging views in the picker makes them steps. The public API and the raw view parameters panel (Shift + Alt + P in Visualise) can set a view’s step too.

Why a view can look slightly different

A view doesn’t store node positions. Loading it lays the map out from scratch, starting from the Edit canvas positions, and the map glides there from what’s on screen while the camera eases to the saved one. The same view always settles the same way, but moving nodes in Edit mode changes the result.

Stepping through a reveal is the exception: each step carries on from the one before. Going through the steps in order always ends up the same way, but opening a step directly lays it out from scratch, so it can look different.

While you explore, changing a setting carries on from the current layout rather than starting again. Re-run layout (the circular arrow in the toolbar’s Layout group) starts from scratch, which shows you what the view will look like when it’s next loaded.

Export an image

Export PNG (the image button in the toolbar’s Export group) downloads what’s on screen: the same zoom, position, selection and legends. Nothing is laid out again, so set up the framing first. Saving a view first makes the export easy to repeat.

Legends are drawn open and in full, even ones collapsed or scrolling on screen. The About this map panel is always included, open, as a reader would see it: without its buttons, naming people rather than saying “you”, and giving dates rather than times such as “3 minutes ago”.

The image is high resolution and marked at 300 DPI, so it’s the right size when placed in a document. A full-screen export is roughly 4,000 pixels wide. Very large canvases can hit a browser limit. You’re told if the image had to be made smaller.

The file is named after the map, the loaded view (if any) and the date.