Design canvas features for PAW sheets

At present, Planning Analytics Workspace allows the user to include design elements, such as images and videos, in reports, but the lack of several basic features of common design tools like Adobe Illustrator make it unwieldy to create highly-designed interfaces for clients.

The following features are recommended to enhance the usability of PAW to create highly-designed User Experiences.

Note: I have grouped these features into one RFE due to their dependencies on each other.

1) Element Locking:

A locked element would not respond to drag and drop events, which would pass through to the elements below (as if the element didn't exist).

Elements could be locked with a right-click menu, then unlocked by accessing a menu showing all locked items.

The locked status would be saved with the book.

2) Element Grouping

A grouping feature would allow multiple design elements to be selected and "grouped". They would then be treated as a single element in the report, for the purposes of moving, resizing, setting z-order, etc.

3) Reference Elements

A reference element is an element included in a report that only displays when the report is in edit mode. This would allow visual elements to be included for design reference only.

4) Guides & Rulers

A guide is usually dragged into place from a ruler. Guides allow designers to set common regions to which design elements can be snapped. This makes it easier to line up elements for consistency.

Guides would not render with the report, and would only be visible in edit mode. Additional view options, such as "display guides", "snap to guides" and "show rulers" would be useful in edit mode.

5) Grid

The ability to define and active a grid would help position and align elements. Additional view options, such as "grid size", "display grid" and "snap to grid" would be useful in edit mode.

6) Enhanced Snapping

At present, snapping is always turned on. This can be undesirable when adjusting fine positioning of elements. The ability to toggle snapping on and off would alleviate this.

In addition, snapping options such as "snap to edges", "snap to elements", etc would enhance this functionality further. See point 4) and 5) above.

7) Layers

The ability to define canvas layers would greatly enhance a design experience in PAW.

Layers could be added or removed by the sheet designer, with each element assigned to a particular layer. Layers could have their order adjusted, be merged / flattened, or be deleted completely. All elements assigned to the layer would be affected by these operations.

Note that layers can be mimicked by using grouping and z-order concepts above, but make organizing elements in a report much easier.