Report over Report or Sheet over Report function

Rannie Xu

It would be nice if we can create a sheet or report which make references to a field on a sheet summary report instead of referencing to underlying sheets.

I currently created a project plan template where there is formula built into the sheet summary to pull information from project plan to sheet summary. Then I created sheet summary report to pull multiple project plans together to report on key metrics (e.g. start date, end date, go-live date, project name, business owner, project status etc.). This is great because sheet summary report can join every project plans together and also since the sheet summary is populated by formula, it prevents any human interventions or error. However, now, I want to create some formulas to calculate how many projects have delivered on time, or I want to know the count for each category and what the status of those projects are (e.g. 3 digital projects, 2 in progress, 1 not started). Since now it deals with multi-dimensional metrics (i.e. project category count by project status), directly using sheet summary report doesn't work…. Creating a sheet also doesn't work because I now have to manually count how many projects are in progress for each project category. I can't build in formula to count that. If I can create a sheet which can reference to a sheet summary report, then this can be done easily. My only workaround right now is to create a new sheet with metrics I need and have PMs enter their project's information which then defeats the entire purpose I had with sheet summary on their project plan since now they have to enter the information in two different places.