Background Items

Highlight areas of the map and add clarity to the model with the use of background shapes and text. These can be dragged on to the canvas from the left hand side toolbar and the colour, size and shape can be customised in the same way as a regular node.

Locking Background Items

Realisor allows you to lock the backing nodes (backing shapes and text) into position on the canvas. This is done through using the ‘Lock Background’ option that in the ‘Formatting’ section of the Home tab. Use this button to turn on/off the ‘Lock Background’ functionality. Note that this locks all background items currently on the canvas and makes them un-selectable until ‘Lock Background’ has been turned off.
 

Adding Borders 

Background items can now have borders added to them. If you select a backing item on the canvas and click the ‘Format’ tab that appears in the ribbon menu, a number of border options will appear.
Here you can customise determine whether you wish to have a visible border on a node, select the colour, width, border style and which sides of the background item you wish to have the borders on. This is particularly useful for example if you wish to show a dividing line on your Outcome Map – you can simply set the border for one edge of the background item. To remove borders, simply turn off the ‘Show’ option for the borders you no longer wish to have visible

Map Visibility Options

As well as customising your nodes, you have control over several visibility options in Realisor that you can use to alter the appearance of your map. These can be found in two places within the Performance Map section – within the ‘View’ section on the Home tab and within the ‘General Visibility’ section of the Map View tab. 

Let’s look at the ones in the Home tab first. 

The options here are ‘Show Weights’, ‘Show Qualities’, ‘Show Measures’ and ‘Show Connections’. When Realisor is loaded 'Show Qualities', Show Benefits', and ‘Show Connections’ are automatically turned on. This means that the Qualities attached to the Initiatives, any benefit measure that is added to an Outcome node and any links made between nodes are visible. Turning on Show Weights will display the weights on the links between the modules and the weights on the qualities. 

Now let’s take a look at the Map View tab. In here, there are some options that are duplicated from the Home tab but there are also some new visibility functions.

The first option is to ‘Reverse Map’. There are two modelling styles - with Outcomes to the left hand side of the map, which is the default setting in Realisor or Outcomes to the right hand side of the map. Realisor allows you to change between these two styles of mapping by use the ‘Reverse Map’ option – clicking this will simple reverse your map.

The next new visibility option in this tab is ‘Plain Node’. Plain nodes removes the ‘extra decorations’ from the nodes on the Outcome Map. The nodes become a single colour block rather than a colour graded block and outlines are removed.

‘Show IDs’ shows or hides the ID values on all node types. Similarly ‘Show Minor IDs’ shows or hides the ID values on the minor nodes - the Benefit Measures and Qualities.

‘Show Line Descriptions’ shows and hides any descriptions that have been added to the connections on the map.

‘Show Line Lags’ shows and hides the lag times on links between programmatic nodes, such as processes, functions etc.