Best Of

Hello everyone!

I do quite a bit of freelancing, and Smartsheet is a big part of my work. Recently, I helped a very distraught doctor who worked at a business with limited funds. He was trying to figure out how to test his students on their practicals in real time using technology. After the exams, he also wanted the ability to send results both to the students and to the facilitators.

I built a solution in Smartsheet that allowed him to grade his students on over 400 questions, using more than 400 columns! I set up custom automations, workflows, and email notifications so results could be distributed quickly and efficiently. He was thrilled with the outcome and was able to increase his efficiency by over 50% as he transitioned from paper-based exams to a fully digital process.

This was one of my proudest projects since it made such an impact on his work.

I really like the idea of having the ability to have stakeholders or anyone be able to comment or add comments to a Dashboard. I even thought of the idea (and IF POSSIBLE) to be able to turn on/off the comments feature or be able to toggle it off or on, depending on the users or maybe within a certain timeframe? Could it also be only visible to the Admin or Owner of the dashboard, too?

Recently I had to have an internal client review the dashboard I created for his online course tracking and to get his feedback I was able to make a static PDF of the dashboard and add it as a Proof for his review. I gathered his comments and annotations through the Proofing feature to capture what he needed, liked, and what to do away with.

To answer some of your questions in your post here are my thoughts:

• Have you ever wished you could comment directly on a dashboard? Maybe once or twice. I do worry that stakeholders can really go rogue with their comments and would open up a door of continuous feedback. I also would not want someone else to see stakeholder comments or feedback thus the ask to have it only visible to the Dashboard Admin or Owners?
• Do you take screenshots or write long Slack/Email messages instead? I used Proofing and added a static PDF to gather feedback and explain the why's/how's/and where's.
• Would annotations make this better — or just add noise? It will definitely add noise IMO. But can it be contained noise (i.e. the ask of Admin and Owners can be able to view or toggle off and on)?
• Do you feel the need to have a lightweight approval mechanism built in to Dashboards to get sign-off from your stakeholders? This would be interesting to see on what this would look like. Would it function similarly as the Proofing is setup for review and approvals? Tell me more!