Lock Chart Widget Colors to maintain the colors your customers select

Chris M Johnson

Why this idea? This week we added a new value to a Status column in a grid sheet that feeds several reports that feed over 40 pie chart widgets across our dashboards. The widget colors were completely changed on every pie chart on all related dashboards, including the one viewed by our C-suite executives! This caused a great deal of maddening manual rework to reset the colors for each value before a major leadership meeting occurred. A huge reason we chose Smartsheet was Dashboards, but this widget color reset is not smart at all. See the example below.

Please redesign this immediately so that the colors we choose for our dashboard widgets do not change automatically when we add another value.

Example: We set Blocked to orange which changed to red (a color we've never chosen for any value); we had Not Started set to light gray but it changed to the green we had selected for Submitted for Approval which changed to yellow (another color we don't use). The colors below had to be reset for every pie.

Brad Carlson

I am having the same problem. This was called out in 2019 as an issue, brought up again in 2023 (on my quick search for a solution I found these old comments). I am VERY surprised it has not been resolved. This really limits the use of a chart widget (very disappointed).

Chris M Johnson

We found that the only solution currently is to create dummy data for every possible status, create the widget and set colors for each status, save, then go back to the sheet and delete the dummy data. Considering how projects change, a new status value could be added at any time and puts one right back with different colors than selected. I am really surprised this wasn't thought out when Smartsheet was launched and still hasn't been addressed.