The slice of a schedule you want to discuss in a meeting is rarely the whole schedule. Isolate mode lets you remove everything except the part you care about — the critical path, a delayed area, one sub-contractor’s scope — and present that on a clean canvas with no greyed-out clutter.
Why “isolate” instead of “filter”
Most schedule tools offer a filter that hides or fades out non-matching activities. The audience can still see them; you can still see them. Attention drifts to whatever you’re trying not to talk about.
Isolate mode genuinely removes everything else from the canvas. The remaining activities re-lay out as if they were the whole schedule — no awkward holes where hidden work used to be, no faded-out distractions. The diagram you present is the diagram you mean.
Three ways to isolate
- By selection — click activities (hold Ctrl for multi-select), then click Isolate.
- By WBS branch — right-click a WBS group and choose Isolate this branch.
- By the longest path — click Critical Path, then click Isolate. Only the critical chain remains.
Including dependencies
By default, isolating a set of activities also keeps any dependencies between them. If you want to extend the visible neighbourhood, hold Shift when you click Isolate — LogicReader will then also include immediate predecessors and successors of the selected activities. Useful when the meeting is about a delay and you want one hop of context on either side.
Restoring the full schedule
Click Show All in the toolbar (or press Esc). The full schedule re-lays out in a couple of seconds.
Combining with Compare
Isolate works on top of Compare. Run a comparison, then isolate the WBS branch you want to discuss. The diff colouring (green / red / amber) is preserved; the meeting becomes about how this one scope changed, not how the whole programme moved.
A note on the underlying graph
Isolate is not a destructive operation — the underlying graph is untouched. We rebuild the canvas from a subset query, so toggling Isolate / Show All many times in a meeting has no cumulative effect. The full graph (and any future Cypher-style queries that ride on it) always has access to every node.