Realtime Metrics constrained by static columns and dashboard limitations

dkrebsbach

Smartsheet Community

I have a dashboard for client that shows various financial and reporting KPIs/metrics for their business. One of the widgets they have requested is a 12-Month moving sales table that shows current month + last eleven months. I have figured out how to create the table in a sheet using various functions and sheet references, but I cannot figure out how to display this information on the dashboard without hard-writing the labels. In other words, I either have to create a table for each year and then update the names for all twelve rows at the start of each month, or I get a widget that shows the automatically updated information, but it looks terrible whether its side by side or stacked. As far as I know, there is no way to have column names automatically update based on formulas.

How the sub-table looks in the metric helper sheet:

What I selected as part of widget setup:

Output Side by Side:

Output Stacked:

Ideal:

Maybe there is a way to do this with the report widget, but those don't look aesthetic at all, especially for the client side.

My overall frustration with dashboards is how limited they are, especially on the HTML/CSS front end where the widgets are so rigid and waste so much space. Further, after perusing all of the Dashboard collateral from Smartsheet, the ideal dashboard examples are from competitors (Power BI, Tableau, etc) that I would have to then host and redirect as a web widget.

I love smartsheet and it makes me so much better internally at my job, but giving the clients what they want on the Dashboard side is proving difficult. Is there a resource or method I am unaware of that would help me shift my perspective? Thanks!

kowal

hi @dkrebsbach,

somehow I understand your frustration as I have been there as well.

If it goes for the Metric Widgets it always take the name of the column for which we take the widget and this is the only editable name on dashbaord :(

what you can do to have it the ideal way is to create extra 12 columns.. each column would be called: Jan 2024, Feb 2024 and link your values (cell linking) in the first row under each column (so it will be horizontal instead of vertical) now when mark those as Metric wideget you will get your Ideal solution :)

hope it helps.

dkrebsbach

@kowal , i thought about that as well, but then I still have to go and update the column names as a new month is added into the range and the oldest month drops off….or delete a column and add a column. it's more elegant and certainly more efficient than what I'm doing, so thank you for the input.