Update reporting for Active Projects

A&W Admin

Hi,

I've searched extensively and can't find the answer to my question in the help section.

We have a blueprint in control centre, which has produced approximately 400 active projects. The template is 5 subfolders, 4 sub-sub folders, and 46 sheet/report/dashboard templates. We have a number of rollup sheets and dynamic reports through control centre. Because we're at the limit of Smartsheet capabilities in a number of instances, we find there are often linking errors. To mitigate the errors, we often use the "update reporting" functionality available in the individual active project actions in Control Centre. However, to go through and "update reporting" for each individual project x 400... it's a huge amount of time.

Does anyone have a suggestion on how to do a mass update?

Genevieve P.

Hi @A&W Admin

While there currently isn't an option to bulk "update reporting", you could create a Global Update and select profile data that already exists to do something similar.

Here are the steps for this:

1. Login to Control Center at https://controlcenter.smartsheet.com/
2. Select Manage Program from the top left corner of the screen.
3. Navigate to the Global Updates tab.
4. Choose New Update in the top right of the screen.
5. Choose the “Add Profile Data” global update template.
6. Click Next
7. Give your Global Update a descriptive name such as "Bulk Update Reporting" and select the Blueprint associated with the impacted summary sheet.

1. Under the Profile Data Options checkboxes, only check the box "Add profile data to summary sheet if missing." This is the setting that allows data to be synced up to the summary sheet.
2. Then in the “Field” field, enter the name of an existing piece of profile data.

• You can identify profile data fields by navigating to your summary sheet and looking at the column names on that sheet.
• The column names on that sheet should match the profile data names as long as the field is being linked in from one of your provisioned project sheets.
• Note that if you add a value in the "Field" field that doesn't match the name of an existing piece of profile data, a new profile data field will be added to your sheets and reporting.

3. Leave the value field blank.

1. From the Templates dropdown, choose a sheet that already has the piece of profile data you selected. The profile data on the sheet can be found on an indented row under a row that contains the word "Summary" in the primary column.
2. Click Create & Run
3. Choose a sheet to test on, this test won't impact production sheets.
4. Click Apply Test
5. Click Open Test sheet and verify the Profile Data looks correct.

You shouldn't see any new rows added to your sheet if you successfully selected an existing piece of profile data. 

1. Close the sheet and go back to the global update screen. If everything looked expected, click Confirm
2. Click Apply Update to proceed with applying the update.
3. Confirm that each Project is selected that you want to run Update Reporting on, then click Apply.

Once the global update finishes running, all selected Projects should show a green success message. If you see any projects with a red error when running, these specific projects can be rerun a second time. Opening the global update screen should give you a list of targeted projects with the successful runs showing a green checkmark. You can re-run the global update against the impacted projects missing the checkmark by selecting them.

Cheers,

Genevieve

A&W Admin

Hi, thank you for your answer. I followed your instructions; however I think the Global Updates must have been updated (ha!) since these instructions were written as I found the screen and instructions didn't quite align.

I am curious though, when I ran the test I got an orange warning sign (see below) that says "Field "Project Name" has already taken in the sheet [sheet name]". Would you know if the sheet does, in fact, update if this warning is present?

Genevieve P.

Hey @A&W Admin

Thanks for the feedback, and my apologies for the delay!

Yes, I would expect that your cell-links will update, despite the warning message that you already have the same data that you're looking to "update". Can you confirm if they did or not?

Thanks!

Genevieve

Jamie K

Hi @Genevieve P.

We had the same requirement where we added a new blueprint summary and was looking for bulk update reporting feature to build the links into the Blueprint summary sheet. I followed your workaround and it works pretty well and got our new summary sheet updated with all the existing projects' metadata using global update. However we encountered a strange "side-effect" of this approach, All our "archived" projects were turned to "Active" status as a result of this update reporting! It would appear that the update reporting will also reset the Project Created Value to True (in our case Active) (see below snapshot of our Blueprint Configuration - Intake Settings page).

I am not sure why Control Center is doing it this way, I mean the Global Updates in this case is simply to add profile data item to summary sheet if missing, why would it also set the Project Created Value too?

I thought I should post this here in the community to see if anyone had the same experience or have any thoughts on this...

Tobias Krause

Hi @Genevieve P. ,

Thank you for posting this workaround! I missed that feature for a long time and now came across this discussion. This workaround saved me so much time! works very well. So far I did not see any unwanted side-effects.