Insight - Level Settings

Owned by Rulon Allred
Last updated: Apr 13, 2022
3 min read

Insight – Level Settings

If you haven’t checked out the https://estimating-america.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SEUG/pages/257458189 article yet, please do so before exploring this page. We won’t be covering the basics in this article and will dive right into some of the Level settings features of the insight tab.

Level Settings

By clicking on any of the Fields in the Levels in view section of the Insight Designer window, you will see a Level Settings section display.

In this section you can specify the sorting, pick the columns that you would like to see displayed, add a filter, specify what to include/exclude, and make text appearance changes like font size and bold. Pay attention to what level you have selected in the Levels in view, because the Level Settings that you set will only apply to whatever level you have selected in the Levels in view.

We will start with the Sorting section.

Sorting

The sorting section gives me the ability to sort the data on the level selected by a column of choice. It then gives you the option to sort by ascending, descending or none. You can click the Columns button to turn on or off columns of choice. If you make changes to anything in this section, clicking the Refresh button will allow you to see what the changes would look like in the Preview window.

Filter

The filter box gives us the option to apply additional filters to the data. You can select an Operator then specify a Value the Operator uses to filter.

These filters work like this:

= equals, meaning: has to be exactly the same *= everything starting with (then you can put text or numbers and it will look for things that start with the same info) regex meaning you have to set up a regular expression to match (a little complicated for my taste/more for programmers) != everything except (everything but)

Below the Filter there are two checkboxes. These two checkboxes allow us to include or exclude values that don’t fit in our filtering. In our work breakdown structure (WBS) we will have many varying levels. Some sections may go 4 or 5 layers deep, while others will only go 1 or 2.

The include other checkbox allows us to remove sections that don’t have information specified. This is most often displayed as Without Heading or Without Category. See example image below. If I uncheck the Include other box, it will remove these types of items from view.

 

The checkbox to Include components with 0 quantity is fairly self explanatory. This allows you to display information that has a 0 in the quantity. Some cases where this would be useful is if you have line items that you need to convey the lack of information in your estimate. For example, if you are a General Contractor and haven’t received a number from a subcontractor yet but you are still expecting to get one. You would likely want to display that in the view so you can see that it isn’t a complete estimate yet.