Most of what a risk analysis or a traceability matrix produces is never read inside the tool. It is exported, copied, printed and handed to someone who has to trust it. August’s releases across Risksheet, Powersheet, Gantt, Planningboard and Checklist are mostly about that hand-off: the PDF that has to show exactly what changed since the last baseline, the row that has to copy in full, and the column that has to say something Polarion doesn’t store.
Risksheet
What Changed, Down to the Cell
A reviewer comparing two baselines of an FMEA is not only interested in the risk table. The cover pages carry the document-level properties — scope, intended use, applicable standards, the approvals — and a good share of those are inherited from referenced documents rather than typed into this one. Until now, baseline compare in the PDF export stopped at the sheet. The cover pages showed the current values and left the reviewer to find the differences by hand.
The Risksheet PDF export now applies baseline compare to the document properties on the cover pages, including properties inherited from referenced documents. Where properties are laid out as a table, changes are resolved per cell: a single edited value is highlighted on its own, instead of the whole table being flagged as changed. The reviewer sees precisely what moved and nothing else. It is switched on per export template, so existing exports keep their current layout until you opt in.
In the same release, a regression that stripped the red and green change highlights from modified cells in compare-mode exports is fixed, so the sheet part of a compare export is reliable again as well.
Exports That Finish
Exporting a sheet with a few thousand rows used to be an act of faith. The browser would raise its “page unresponsive” warning during the export, often again afterwards, and the honest answer to “did it work?” was “wait and see”. The PDF export pipeline has been reworked for large sheets. Exports of any size now run without triggering the browser’s unresponsiveness warning, during or after generation. Text in custom Table fields, which used to be truncated in the PDF, now exports in full.
Merged by Default — or Not
Risksheet merges cells with identical content across levels so that a failure mode with five causes reads as one failure mode, not five repeated ones. That is the right default for reading. It is often the wrong default for editing, because an engineer working through individual items in a deep hierarchy keeps switching the merged view off.
The default for the Merge levels option (previously called “Flat table”) can now be set by the administrator, in the Risksheet configuration or through context properties, instead of every sheet starting merged. Teams with deep merge hierarchies can open the sheet the way they actually work in it, and switch to the merged view when they want to read it.
Copies That Are Complete
Three fixes this month share a theme: duplicating a row must duplicate the whole row. “Copy items” and “Insert items below” silently dropped multi-item link cells on the duplicate; a later variant showed the source’s Mitigation in the copy and then dropped it on save. Pasting a copied row stopped at the first multi-item link column and lost every column to its right. All three are fixed. This matters more than it reads: the linked-item columns are where the traceability lives, and a duplicate that silently lost its risk controls is the kind of gap an auditor finds before you do.
Powersheet
Columns That Don’t Need a Home in Polarion
The most useful column in a traceability matrix is often one nobody wants to store. “3 of 5 verifications passed, 1 blocked” is a summary of other values, and it should update itself whenever those values change. Until now, every computed column in Powersheet had to be bound to a Polarion field, which left two bad options: add a custom field to the data model purely to have somewhere to put a display value, or do without the column.
Powersheet now supports display-only computed columns. A column can be declared as computed and unbound: it calculates, it shows, and nothing is ever written back to Polarion. Stored computed columns remain available for values that should persist, so for each column you decide whether the result is data or presentation. A display-only column can also look across the whole row, which is what makes a summary like “3 of 5 passed” under a requirement possible. It is a one-line change in the sheet configuration; the guide below shows both forms side by side.
Read more: Add a Computed Column
Fewer Trips Through the Sheet
Two smaller editing changes. You can now select several non-adjacent cells and paste one value into all of them at once, instead of pasting cell by cell. And copying a cell from a column with custom rendering now puts the displayed value on the clipboard, rather than empty or wrong text.
Gantt and Risksheet
Faster Page Loads on Large Clusters
On clustered Polarion installations with many concurrent users, concurrent licensing was adding noticeable time to every page load in both Gantt and Risksheet. That is fixed in both products. Risksheet also had a regression where the first page load froze for several seconds because its assets were not cached; that is resolved as well. If you run either product for a large user base, these fixes alone are the reason to take the August versions.
Checklist
Exports That Complete, Permissions That Make Sense
A checklist that cannot be exported is a compliance record that cannot be handed over. Two configurations left the Checklist PDF export stuck on its loading spinner: a checklist whose label differed from the underlying field name, and a checklist placed as the first field in the form. Both now export and show the real completion state instead of 0 of N. Separately, a document checklist became read-only for users who lacked modify permission on the work item type configured in the document, a permission on the wrong object. Editability now depends only on the document field permission, which is what a document checklist should check.
Small Fixes That Matter
The rest of this month’s fixes came directly from customer reports and real-world usage.
Risksheet
Sorting the sheet no longer marks it as modified and activates Save
Changing a column width no longer marks the sheet as modified
Entering a multi-item link column no longer scrolls the sheet to the left
The item picker is no longer cut off by the bottom of the window the first time it opens
Cells no longer flicker during edit
Powersheet
An expression that reads the current entity now produces the same value in the XLSX export as on screen
For sheet authors, dynamic expressions now expose the entity, the row and the source under distinct names; the previous shared variable still works but is deprecated
Gantt
Parents above the direct-parent level with a derived schedule are no longer marked as modified when a child change does not affect their schedule
Planningboard
Sorting by the priority field now works for parent-item swimlanes
Checklist
Long URLs in an entry name or comment now wrap instead of stretching the checklist past the page width and pushing the row’s action buttons off-screen
What’s Next
The Gantt role-based planning preview we described in July is already moving. September brings a hierarchical resource picker that navigates a Resource Breakdown Structure with tens of thousands of nodes, cross-project views that compare each resource’s allocation against its capacity, and department-level capacity on the Planningboard so that team pools count toward what the board shows. We will cover those properly next month.
If baseline compare on your PDF cover pages or display-only columns in your traceability matrix would change how your reviews run, contact us and we will walk through the setup in your own environment.
Until next month — stay efficient, connected, and let’s keep pushing Polarion forward together. 🚀