How to create a dashboard from a client smartsheet project

Angie Hatfield

We are working on a system conversion. The project is in Smartsheet but owned by the new system company.

They've not been able to provide the level of reporting my SLT is requesting.

How can I create a dashboard from that project without doing any changes or calculations, summaries within their project?

They did make me an admin so I can create reports, but they lack some details that I need to calculate.

Any suggestions?

Thanks for your help!🙂

Kerry St. Thomas

You can leverage premium apps if you have access. DataMesh can create a dynamically updating duplicate of the original sheet, Data Shuttle to produce "snapshots" of the sheet that in turn can be selectively moved to a sheet you own, and Pivot can aggregate info from reports you can already create. Since you'd own those assets, you can add the formulas or summaries to your need, and use them as the basis of your dashboarding.

If you don't have any premium app access (or don't want to go that deeply), you can create KPI sheets - cross-sheet formulas that could be strategically created to give you a separate place to do the calculations you need. This may or may not be able to solve what you're after, depending on the specific calculations you need.

The simplest answer to me, though, seems to be to add column formulas to the existing sheets and then hide those columns. That way you'll have access to whatever info you need (and can resurface via Reports) but the user experience on the project management sheets will be effectively the same.