A knowpar (pronounced "no-par") is a contraction of knowledge paragraph. This is a unique feature of SWARM and consists of a series of fill-in-the-blank sentences grouped into paragraphs, themed around a particular subject, such as the scale of a problem or the potential costs involved in solving a problem. A knowpar can be viewed in edit mode or completed (preview) mode.
You can edit any text in a knowpar sentence by clicking the pencil icon on the right-side of the page next to the row you want to the edit. Note that you must be in edit mode (not completed / preview mode).
You can rearrange any of the rows by clicking on the three vertical dots on the left-hand side of the card and dragging the row to the desired location in the card.
You can also add an exception or more detail to any sentence by typing where it says, "Please enter any extra text here..." The knowpar sentence might read "We operate 12 Distribution Centers", and you could add in the extra text to say, "in our North American operation, and 5 more worldwide."
Note that Heading (or paragraph break) rows are displayed in dark blue in the card, as shown below (e.g., the rows with the text "Suppliers", "Transportation", and "Facilities" in the picture below are Heading rows). The alternating light and dark grey rows are Sentence rows. Sentence rows will be grouped into a paragraph. You can start a new paragraph or create a paragraph break by adding a new Heading row. For step-by-step instructions on how to complete a knowpar, see this article.
Example
Knowpar in edit mode for the Scale card of an Inbound Logistics use case
Same Knowpar now shown in the completed (preview) view
Hint:
A Heading row in edit mode (the dark blue row in our example screenshot) can function as either a new paragraph heading or paragraph break depending on if you check or uncheck the "Display in report" checkbox when creating or editing the Heading row.
If you leave the "Display in report" checkbox checked, then the Heading will appear in Completed / Preview mode as a paragraph heading. However, if you uncheck this box, then it will create a paragraph break and the heading text will not appear in the report. In our original example above, we included the Heading rows "Suppliers", "Transportation", and "Facilities", but if we wanted to make the "Transportation" row a paragraph break instead of a heading then we could edit the row and uncheck the "Display in report" checkbox.
The Completed / Preview output would then resemble the output below, with a paragraph break where the "Transportation" heading used to be:
