Hi all,
We're looking to migrate a production performance tracking tool from Excel into Smartsheet so we can leverage connections to other datapoints we have stored there.
Intent: One of the functions this Excel is serving (via VBA) is to provide a live clock function with seconds to show time elapsed between a 'start' event trigger and a 'finish' event trigger.
Approach: In Smartsheet, we can certainly use automations to timestamp a start and finish event, and effectively the same strategy to get the equivalent of Excel's NOW() value. From this, simple math gets us to a total time (finish - start) or elapsed time (now - start), so we're 95% there, though importantly, we still don't have a seconds value.
Problem: Management is requesting a dashboard with a rolling seconds function since this has a bit more visual impact than updating once a minute.
I'm assuming several constraints to this:
- Dashboard refresh frequency is a function of page refresh.
- Timestamp values and date math functions don't include seconds.
We can certainly set up production displays to refresh the page every minute (or every second, but that will probably kill the effect by reloading the page constantly), but the hope is we can get an actual second value to update live.
This doesn't have to actually be coming from the sheet data, if we can somehow fake a 0-60 counter in a dashboard, and show this next to the HH:MM data as a metric, we can make that work. Was looking at the web content widget but can't find anything that will play nice with this (Smartsheet claims "no embeddable content").
Please provide support for the above strategy or alternate solutions.
