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Ahh, very interesting. Thanks for clarifying this. In this case, I do believe the students would need to make a Smartsheet account, or else Smartsheet would not know how to match them to the Contact column in order to display the rows of the current user.

To your second question: When you share a Dashboard with someone, they can only see the data presented in a widget if they have access to an underlying report. Otherwise, they would see this message for any widget to which they don't have at least viewer access to the source sheet:

One way around this may be to create a Dashboard with a filter (unfortunately this is where my expertise ends - I only recently learned about this at ENGAGE 2023 and have not yet had a chance to dig into how it's done and implement it in my dashboards). But, from what I saw, I do believe this could be a viable solution for what you need to do. If I recall correctly from the demo session I attended at ENGAGE, the filtered dashboard uses a form to select the filter. So, you'd have a form of all your students names, and the data displayed on the dashboard would change based on which student is selected (so, it would sort of work like your "current user" view, except the students wouldn't have to have a Smartsheet account to view their data). I know the demo also included a title field so you could see what filter was applied to the dashboard, so that would solve your need for wanting the name of the student at the top of their view.

If this works the way I think it would, I believe you could still publish the Dashboard in "View Only" mode, thus saving your students from having to make a Smartsheet account, and not have to share them to all the underlying sheets. The potential downside would be if there is sensitive student information on the dashboard, because there would really be nothing stopping Student #1 from selecting the filter to view Student #2's data.

I'm sorry I can't walk you through the details of filtering on dashboards, but there should be a recording from ENGAGE or you may be able to find someone else on here with that expertise.

I agree with Nat, this is more an adobe question than a Smartsheet question. Document builder allows you to map columns to a fillable form. If adobe acrobat could dynamically expand/contract the field size then Smartsheet could likely populate the fields.

Depending on how many dynamic fields you have, it could be a viable option to upload multiple versions of the fillable pdf. Then a column formula could calculate length of text and trigger the appropriate document template using conditional paths.

Hi Karen,

Here is a help article regarding sorting in reports. It sounds like you would like to sort items in a custom order, not alphanumeric ascending or descending. Unfortunately this isn't supported at this time. One common approach for implementing a custom sort order is to add a numeric prefix to status values, i.e., "1 - New", "2 - Open", "3 - Closed", "4 - On Hold".

If you would like to see a custom sort feature implemented then I recommend you submit product feedback so the development team is aware this is a common desired feature. Here is a help article with more information on providing product feedback. There is also a Product Ideas forum for discussing your ideas with other users.

Best,

Sal