Best Of

Problem: Current Limitations

• Destructive Updates: Currently, snapping a baseline is a global action for the entire sheet. There is no way to baseline newly added scope (new tasks) without overwriting and erasing the historical variance data of the existing tasks.
• Manual Data Entry: Users are forced to manually copy/paste dates into "Baseline" columns for new tasks to integrate them into reports. This is tedious and prone to user error.
• Static/Isolated Dates: Baseline dates are static snapshots that cannot be linked. There is no way to model "Baseline Dependencies" (e.g., if Baseline Task A moves, does it impact Baseline Task B?) or link baseline dates across sheets for program-level variance tracking.

Proposal: Smart Baseline Management

• "Incremental Snap" Option: Introduce a feature to "Update Baseline for Selected Rows Only." This allows users to officially baseline new scope (Change Orders) without resetting the variance history for the rest of the project.
• Auto-Baseline for New Scope: Provide a project setting to "Automatically set Baseline = Start Date" when a new task is created, ensuring the variance clock starts at 0 immediately for added scope.
• Linkable Baseline Logic: Allow Baseline Start/Finish columns to be referenced in cross-sheet dependencies and formulas, enabling "Baseline Critical Path" analysis across multiple project sheets.

When managing references in a sheet, the menu that pops up to begin editing/duplicating/deleting cross-sheet references is incredibly hard to work with. The box that pops up does not allow the user to expand the bounds of the menu - vertically, horizontally, or diagonally.

Ideally, building the menu out with functionality to expand/manipulate the size of the window would be helpful when managing multiple cross-sheet or cell link references.

Below is a screenshot example of the current Manage References menu in one of my sheets that has multiple cross-sheet references. I can't seem to navigate left or right, nor expand the category titles to drill into the specific cross-sheet reference.

Thanks Smartsheet team!

To start, I'd be happy just being able to center-align the column headers. Ridiculous that it's not yet available.

I currently use this feature (send update request) in our ticketing system that we use as a means of communicating with my vendors ticketing system. Once my vendor uses the link they are unable to provide any other real time updates due to the link being a one time use only. It would be great if we can choose for the link to expire or not.

The "browse" button was recently changed to go through a recent workspaces menu and requiring a second click on "browse all" before actually bringing up the browse menu sidebar. This change is unintuitive as there is a "recents" button right below the browse button and for anyone who regularly uses more than 6 workspaces this change just adds clicks where there should not be. Someone looking for recent workspaces is more likely to click the button that actually says "recents" on it rather than browse as well. It seems that the current "recents" menu only bring up recent grids, reports, and dashboards but not workspaces. To fix this I was thinking the recents menu that pops up could have one section with recent sheets and another section with recent workspaces - this would allow for the recent workspaces insert currently on the browse button to go back away and actually contain recents all within the recents button. The current recents menu is showing easily 15-20 items deep with a scrollbar so there would be plenty of space to implement this change within the recents menu and revert the browse button to its original functionality.

@LukeSmartsheet104, here's a quick workaround suggestion. Create an override column (call it "Override"). Assuming that "<Your Formula>" is your original formula, update it as follows:

=IF(Override@row<>"", Override@row,<Your Formula>)

This says, IF you enter any information in the Override cell, your column will display that cell's information. OTHERWISE, it will use the original formula.

Hope this helps!