How do I get a Dashboard Chart Widget to display 'No Data' when the source report returns no data?

I have a dashboard chart widget whose source data is a report on a sheet. There are times when the report accurately returns no data from the sheet that meets the reporting filter criteria. In that case, the dashboard chart widget displays an 'Unable to display chart' error (screenshot below).

Smartsheet Dash 'Unable to Display' Error.png

This error message is inaccurate and leads the users to believe there is a configuration error or something broken in the chart or the underlying report. This effect is worsened during troubleshooting when attempting to edit the widget, and seeing the prompt to 'Add Data'.

Smartsheet Dash 'Unable to Display' Chart editor.png

The chart widget and the report are correctly configured, it's just that the report has returned no data. Based on the report configuration, 'no data' is an occasional accurate and intended output. With that output, the chart widget should display something more informative and accurate, like the same chart that was there before, just with '0' displayed for each measured parameter.

Does anyone have a solution for this? I had temporary success with a 'Summarize' configuration on the report, but that was apparently only due to ghost data coming through from the source sheet. Once I cleaned up the ghost data, the 'Summarize' configuration failed to resolve the issue again.

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Accepted answers

Genevieve P.

Hi @Adrian Mandile CHESS and everyone on this thread:

There is a related Product Idea where you can vote and add a comment to in order to provide your feedback and explain your scenarios to the Product Team: Reworked Empty Chart State to replace "Unable to display chart" in Dashboards

I don't have an ETA for when or if the error message will be changed for the scenario where a Report has no rows at all. It would be helpful to have this feedback gathered in one place to surface to the Product team, thank you!

Genevieve

All comments

Kelly P.

@Swampcat14

We get around this annoyance by having a very small value populate if everything is a zero. For example, if the chart is a count of something by month, then Jan will populate as .01 if Jan-Dec are all zeros. This keeps the chart from displaying a message indicating a "broken" chart.

Hope this helps!

LaurenGray

Wondering how you make that work, Kelly. Our data are counting how many line items are overdue, and if there are none, the widget breaks the link to the underlying report and shows that error message. How do I get the report to do what you describe? Thanks in advance!

J. Earp

I am having the same issue as well. Were you able to find another workaround?

Swampcat14

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/comment/411377#Comment_411377

@J. Earp - Nothing satisfactory yet. If you, @Kelly P., and @LaurenGray would all please upvote this question in hopes of getting Smartsheet's attention I'd be most grateful!

J. Earp

Yes, just did. The message provided is very misleading because it seems like there is an error or a bad link.

Kelly P.

@Swampcat14 @J. Earp @LaurenGray

Lauren, I did not see that you'd asked me a question -- be sure to @comment when speaking to a specific person so that the an email is generated pinging that person. 😊

I have success by creating a metrics sheet that populates values, including zeros and then using either that sheet or a report based on that sheet for my graphics. To be doubly sure, you can include a very tiny value such as .01 in your calculations so that there are never any true zeros. For example, =COUNTIFS({Sheet1_ColumnA}, = "Value1", {Sheet1_ColumnB} = "Value2") + .01 would produce the value .01 if the rest of the formula produces a zero. In the metrics sheet, you can set the column to show only whole numbers, so you don't ever see the tiny value. With this approach, you won't ever get the message implying that the chart is broken.

Hope this helps!

Shannon Polok

[SOLVED] Not sure if this was related or backend was updated by smartsheets, but opened and saved the source data sheet and chart now displays correctly.

____________________________________________________________________________________

Same issue occurred for us, tried the following

removing's and adding chart widget
tried "Kelly P" Solution of adding .01 so there were no zero values
even tried just selecting so no values that should have been zero in selection.

But none of these resolved the issue,

This sheets was running for all 2022, duplicated and running successful to all 2023 and was duplicated in December for a 2024 version, mid December the chart was working. Now all three are showing an error.

Dan R

Still having this issue as well

Leslie19

I'd like to vote for a resolution on this issue as well, my reports on my dashboards are text (i.e. not numbers) and some very intricate filter criteria. So I don't see how I can generate a "filler" for that?

There will be instances where my reports will be blank, but I want them to keep working say the next month when they are not blank any more.

Looking forward to a resolution on this!

Leslie

Adrian Mandile CHESS

Well-documented @Swampcat14,

@Genevieve P., @Aman Shah, this is an ongoing UI issue for Smartsheet and must be addressed if the product is to be taken seriously as a presentation tool.

It is NOT ok for us to have to fudge COUNT() and SUM() formulas by adding 0.01 to them just to display a zero data chart. It should be perfectly appropriate to display a zero chart if, for example, there ARE zero overdue invoices, or active tasks, etc. Note: metrics widgets with zeros and empty reports still display properly in these cases.

Can we please have an idea of when a more appropriate message/resolution will be available to this bug.

Genevieve P.

Hi @Adrian Mandile CHESS and everyone on this thread:

Genevieve

Swampcat14

I'm closing this thread in favor of the one Genevieve linked to (Reworked Empty Chart State to replace "Unable to display chart" in Dashboards) since there's not a current solution.

For anyone who stumbles across this thread in the future, please click the link above to the Product Idea submission and upvote/comment there.

Thanks y'all!

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