Best Of

@Julia Rumburg Price How exactly are you adding new rows in a report, and how do you include a sort inside of a filter?

The Smartsheet licensing change coincided with an organization-wide initiative to review and consolidate project management tools into a single platform. Prior to the licensing change, my hope was that Smartsheet would be selected as the standard tool. Over the past couple of years, I invested significant time building a comprehensive project and portfolio management system in Smartsheet, including hundreds of sheets, reports, dashboards, and automated workflows. I also delivered multiple demos to other divisions, which received positive feedback and strong interest in both the tool and what we had built.

While Smartsheet was ultimately shortlisted, we decided to migrate away from it, with the updated licensing model being a contributing factor. I genuinely like the product and will be sad to move on, but it’s not feasible for us to purchase licenses for every individual who only needs to make occasional, minor edits to a sheet.

Just chiming in to add a wholehearted agreement. Luckily due to the timing of our renewal our organization was able to get ahead of a lot of the anticipated issues and negotiate a bit on rate, but I suspect some of the options that were available to us were not necessarily available to others. We are only entering our second month on the new model and so far it has been manageable with few hiccups, but I am monitoring things very closely.

This was definitely a decision that was made with Smartsheet's private equity shareholders in mind (IIRC, the model changed was debuted at ENGAGE 2024 just a few weeks after the buyout was announced) and not its customers. The value proposition is not there for existing customers, and it will be cost-prohibitive for prospective customers that are smaller and don't have the budgets to afford that many licenses.

It's a shame because Smartsheet's flexibility is/was its biggest competitive differentiator IMO, but they are making it harder for users within the same domain to collaborate. You are totally right - we shouldn't have to change existing workflows due to budgetary restrictions, especially when no new functionality is being granted as part of this change!!

Unfortunately our feedback is likely to fall on deaf ears, but it can't hurt to be noisy about it in the hopes that they listen.

We hit this problem last year and were able to by the Dynamic View add on without a need to pay for each view due to the contract we were on.

I now have everyone (other than 5 licenced system admin users) access smartsheet data through the dynamic views to either view or edit. This is a brilliant tool as it:

1. allows me to restrict what rows in a smartsheet a person sees by the dynamic view being linked either to a field with an email or by a preset filter
2. it then allows me to limit what fields a user can edit rather than them running amuck across all fields in all records on the smartsheet
3. a user can create their own filters and… the export on a smartsheet downloads all records regardless whereas a download from dynamic view only downloads the records that meet the filter. This allows my users to select just records for a specific customer or need, download them to excel and then attachmet the to an email without having to delete thousands of inappropriate rows
4. because I can restrict the rows people see I can now open this us to suppliers so they can only see product records of products they supply
5. also each dynamic view of the same smartsheet can not only restrcits the rows seen and fields to update but also can have the fields displayed in different sequences so what is important to them is shown first. e.g the Raised by Me view has the input data first but status right at the left as most important, inventory then see what is meaningful to them first etc.

I know the new new model smay charge by view but the other option, if you are a large user, is to look at the Advanced work management where the dynamic views are limitless.

We migrated from an enterprise contract and got dynamic view for about £6k rather than the £80-100k it would have cost us in extra licences and the management of those licences plus we strictly control smartsheet creation.

Good luck

This has been a big hit for our company as well and we will be taking appropriate action to seriously reduce license usage and find alternatives to the solutions we previously created. It's a shame, because for the longest time, I was such a staunch opponent of SmartSheet, only to become an advocate in the past couple of years. Sorry folks. This was definitely a bad business decision.

I was devastated, but recently found a workaround (at least for many of my scenarios). The only way to allow internal users free editing access is to leverage forms and update requests. For me, this works by:

1. Contributors make updates using a weekly 'update request' they get in their email. There could also be other automated triggers based on different use.
2. To add a new item, we use forms. I put those on a Dashboard with a view of the sheet/report (or just share the link with users directly). Then they just click the '+ New' button; this opens an easy to use form.

I hope that helps you brainstorm some helpful ideas. 😬

Hi Katrin,

By design, Smartsheet will create 1 row per form submission. One thing you can try is changing how the form works so it reloads the form every time the form user submits an entry.

You can do this on the Form settings page.