Assistance with workarounds for Smartsheet row/column/cell caps

Hi there,

I recently discovered that Smartsheet projects have hard caps on row/column/cells per sheet, specifically;

  • 20,000 rows per sheet
  • 500,000 cells per sheet
  • 400 columns per sheet

Background: I have a project tracking a large number of rows (50-60,000) worth of unique assets, all of which will need many columns (100+) of data recorded. Tracking and sharing reports and metrics about this data is a critical component of the program I'm working on and involves internal and external stakeholders. I have several reports that are permissioned and filtered for various stakeholder groups to share relevant details from the main sheet. I'm also using a supporting sheet in Smartsheet to gather metrics and it contains hundreds of cells with formulas referencing the main sheet (these tables are leveraged for graphing, particularly needed for graphs with multi-level groupings). In addition, this tactical tracking is a subset within a larger program which is also leveraging Smartsheet for various other tracking and the sheets are all integrated with each other.

Challenge: I'm interested in ideas on how I can track the full row/column count worth of data in Smartsheet while minimizing the amount of overhead needed to update things like Reports and Formulas referencing the single sheet currently. A few points;

  1. First, yes…I have (and continue) to look for ways to reduce row count and column count but there is no way I'll get under the current Smartsheet caps
  2. I don't believe that I can remove rows from the sheet as they become "no longer needed" (i.e. archiving them) as that will eliminate historical records and also remove them from overall metrics tracking needed for the program.
  3. My thought at this time is that my best bet is to clone the current tracking sheet however many times is needed as I approach row or cell cap limits and spread the tracking out across multiple sheets. However, this is problematic for reports (I'd have to update the sheets being pulled into every report I've made each time I create a clone) and REALLY problematic for all of the formulas built that reference the single tracking sheet currently (simple example: if I'm using a COUNTIF on the current state of each asset I would need to update the formula to check multiple different sheets and add together the counts from all of them). Multiple this by hundreds of cells with formulas in them across several sheets and that's an awful lot of overhead and I'm likely to miss some formulas.

Thanks in advance.

-Greg

Answers