Dashboard Calculations -- will they ever be a thing?

Marc Shecter

Hi,

I need to display a bar chart in a dashboard that has one bar for assignee in a project plan. The value of each bar will be the count of late items for each assignee.

the only way I can figure to do this is to have an interstitial 'summary' sheet with one row for each assignee, where their name is in column 1, and a formula would be in column 2 counting the number of late items. then, I can have a dashboard chart pull its data from that interstitial sheet.

The problem is that there will be an ever growing number of assignees as my project moves forward. I don't have time to keep that summary sheet updated with the latest list of assignees.

Does anyone from Smartsheet know if calculations within Dashboards is on the roadmap? Ideally, I should be able to add a chart to the dashboard, where it pulls in the data from my data source sheet. It should ask me which columns to include in the chart, and on what it should calculate values for each column. That is, should it use a sum, count, countd, max, or min?

Without this ability to perform dashboard calculations, I will turn to using Tableau Software or Google Sheet's charts to display data that is readily available within my Smartsheet Datasources.

Thanks,

Marc

Genevieve P.

Hi @Marc Shecter

If your Assignee column is single-select, then I would recommend using a Report to filter rows to show only the late ones, then group by the Assignee, and use the summarize function to COUNT how many rows each person has that's late.

This way you can use the grouped/summarized Report as the source for the chart which will automatically update as new Assignees are added! Here's a free webinar on the report functionality: Redesigned Reports with Grouping and Summary Functions

In regards to automatic calculations without needing to create summaries (either via formulas or through a report), Enterprise plans have access to a feature called Work Insights. This can be found on the right bar of the sheet! See: Use Work Insights to visualize your data. The product team is planning to release a "Work Insights Dashboard Widget" to make this data available on Dashboards later this year - here's the blog post around upcoming updates to the product where this was announced.

Cheers,

Genevieve