Need help on how I would create this dashboard in Smartsheets

Buster Davis

Morning,

I have the following excel dashboard excel sheet that I created. I want to move this to Smartsheets and then create a similar dashboard in SS. Ignore the graphics, that's not important.

I have started with a data sheet in excel for each line items shown below. Now how do get the columns and sections together is my challenge. Any input you may have would be appreciated. TY

David Tutwiler

It looks very much like you would want all of the tasks as part of a Project Plan where each section is a Parent task for all of the children tasks. For example, you would have the Parent row Discovery and all of the child tasks like Discovery, Qualys, ATP, Average, etc.

With a simple helper column that listed the Parent in that column, you could then make a few reports that only pull in the sections you want. For example, if you wanted a Discovery report, you would point the report to the Project Plan and only pull in rows with the helper column of Discovery.

Once you have your reports, it would just be a matter of putting the report widgets on the dashboard in the arrangement you desire.

For the project timeline, you would likely need to create a static image for now. I know that timelines are something that Smartsheet is working on as a view, but I do not believe anything has been released to-date.

Buster Davis

For the grouping. I think you mean I would need a column for title discovery and then I could group by that?

David Tutwiler

Something like this where you could use the helper column as your filter in the report and only look for the Discovery in the helper column:

Buster Davis

This is what my data sheet looks like today.

Do I need to redo it at this point to match what you have above

David Tutwiler

It's all about what you want it to look like, but if you want to have the tasks broken down by section then you will need an identifier somewhere. You might be able to create the report and only bring in the columns you want based on what category they are in, but that will be a manual operation of selecting/deselecting the right columns per report.