Can I Collapse/Hide a Column of a Kanban Board?

[Sebastian Baehr]

Hi 

We use a JIRA Agile Kanban board for our project and we have a column name "Queue (Waiting for Customer)". This column has a relatively high WiP limit since a lot of support tickets that are waiting for a customer response are collected there. This leads to the board being relatively cluttered in this column while the others have low limits.

Is there a way (maybe even a plugin) to collapse the issues of this particular column? Even though we don't have much influence on how many issues are in this column we would still like to easily see how many issues there are (but not the issues themselves).

Regards

Sebastian

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Not really collapse as such, but you could have a quick-filter for "issues not in status (list of the status within Queue)".  Then you could quickly toggle the issues on and off!

[Matthew Perryman]

This is fine, but the unfiltered columns still exist on the screen.  Ideally I'd like to collapse/hide empty columns while under quick filter.

[larisa]

was send by mistake

[larisa]

I don't see "Close" column in Kanban board, but the data is saved and everything can be returned at any time. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I do not understand what you are asking for.

[larisa]

skip please

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Skip what?  Could you explain what you are talking about please?

[Tazo Lezhava]

The way I understood the question (I might be biased as I have the same question), is to be able to have a view/custom board where only non-empty columns are displayed.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yes, that's perfectly clear.  It would of course make the board dysfunctional, so there's no option for it.

[Tazo Lezhava]

hmm, I respectfully disagree. There is no need to take up entire column if there are no issues present in the status. To keep the functionality, you could have empty statuses all collapsed (i.e. still shown, but taking up less room on the board)

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

How would you drop a card into a column that isn't there?

I should be clear here - I don't think there's anything wrong with having a toggle for "hide empty columns", as per Bill's suggestion.  But it absolutely needs to be optional, off by default and have some form of banner to tell people "click here to unhide hidden columns"

[Tazo Lezhava]

I think there are ways around it, eg. drag and drop over the collapsed icon. But I also was suggesting it to be optional, for it to be an additional view that users can add, just like the quick filters. For this specific functionality, Bill's suggestion works well as well, but it can be more general, where for custom boards users can apply custom conditions.

[Walker]

Any update on this? Trello (owned by Atlassian) has an extension that does this...

[Ibrahim Sardar]

We have a scenario where we have a workflow that has a path that is impossible for the current sprint, rendering a handful of empty columns as clutter.

For now, our team is just ignoring those columns because I pushed them all the way to the right side, out of immediate sight.

[Rahul Aich [Nagra]]

Why dont you consider using a quick filter which excludes the data in that column (i.e. you set it as status !=Waiting for customer) 

This way your kanban board will not get cluttered and you can of course get to see the entire cluttered board just by unclicking the Quick filter.

Rahul

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi Kanban board users,

I submitted a suggestion for Atlassian to add column collapse/expand as a native feature of Kanban boards.  Please see this item for details:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWCLOUD-17698

Best regards,

Bill

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Sebastian Baehr 

If you still want to collapse columns on your boards, consider submitting a suggestion for Atalassian to add the feature, similar to column collapsing in the tool Kanbanize.

Best regards,

Bill

[Holly Esparza]

I found something that works, but every time you want to show or hide the column you will need to update the board configuration.

To hide a column, you can merely drag the status(es) in the column configuration off to the right side. This will hide the column when you go back to the board, but the status(es) is still available for use.

To display the column again, configure the board and move those status back to the column. 

I use this technique for a column I always want hidden. I needed to set Epics to this column status in order to exclude Epic counts being added at the top of my "To Do" or "In Progress" columns.

[larisa]

your advice was very useful to me - it works great

[Galina]

Hey!
Even, if someone would try to call it "not ideal solution"- that perfectly helps me. Thought there should be something like this, just could not find on the go.
Big thanks! :)

[Brett Wyrick]

Not a great solution, since it won't go company-wide, but this Chrome extension works flawlessly at the time of this posting:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/column-selector-for-jira/imphacfmmdcaijhaoclekogljkpcoaic/related

[Sander G.M. Buist]

It's not available anymore so don't delete it or it's gone!!

[Ian Girouard]

This one works fine :

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jira-board-column-collaps/hlhmecjeeadfbbmghahgaglgpidankaj

[hjootoorames@vmware.com]

Nice. It would be create if the extension could help us show/hide arbitrary columns. Only hiding empty columns is only partially useful.

[Patrick]

Hi @Sebastian Baehr ,

Thank you @Bill Sheboy for drawing my attention to this.

We actually created a plugin for this.  It's fairly simple and adds the needed functionality.

Here it is:

Collapsible Column for Jira

Let us know if you have any feedback or questions.

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Patrick !

Thanks for the information about your product.  Not to takeaway from the market for marketplace add-on options, collapsible columns seems like a pretty obvious missing feature for software versions of Kanban boards.  Hopefully it will get added in the future to the out-of-the-box product.

Best regards,

Bill