Displaying report summary data in a Dashboard chart widget

SASardy

I have 4 sheets used by individuals to track their work. I have a report that pulls from all 4 of those sheets to give me a total count of items they listed for the month as well as each line item (details of each listing). I have the data filtered, grouped, and summarized. The summary, for example, gives me 11 total items for January. All I want to be able to do is use that count (11) in a Dashboard chart where I will track each summary total by month. However, when I try to chart the data, it wants to chart all of the details and I cannot get it to just give me the count. I could go write formulas to pull all of this data into another sheet but 4 sheets x 12 months is 48 formulas that I would rather not write as this seems something so simple that a report should be able to do and not require me to restate the data elsewhere. What am I doing wrong?

kowal

hi @SASardy,

you are doing nothing wrong. If you want to use Reports for Charts it always take all the data so grouping, summarizing etc. will not help as charts does not see this.

What you can try is to calculate all those things in the Sheet Summary (like tasks per month 11 etc. ) very easily you can copy all the Sheet summary to remaining 3 sheets (on the top you have copy options to copy with formulas inside) and then create a Sheet Summary report instead for all 4 sheets.

Hope this helps.

kowal

hi @SASardy,

you shall then definitely create post on New Product Ideas.

kowal

hi @SASardy,

you are doing nothing wrong. If you want to use Reports for Charts it always take all the data so grouping, summarizing etc. will not help as charts does not see this.

What you can try is to calculate all those things in the Sheet Summary (like tasks per month 11 etc. ) very easily you can copy all the Sheet summary to remaining 3 sheets (on the top you have copy options to copy with formulas inside) and then create a Sheet Summary report instead for all 4 sheets.

Hope this helps.

SASardy

Thank you so much, @kowal . I really wish Smartsheet would allow more flexibility when graphing reports because it just seems like rework to have to use formulas to extract this data when it is literally sitting on the report. Your solution will save me quite a bit of time though and is great to know. Thanks again!

kowal

hi @SASardy,

you shall then definitely create post on New Product Ideas.