Best Practice - How to introduce a new dashboard that will replace existing dashboards across multiple projects

Question

History:  Our PM's have redesigned a dashboard (status report) that replaces our current dashboard format used across all our projects.

Problem: I need to figure out how to replace our current dashboard (and supporting Sheet) with minimal effort.  We have a Template Library (Control Center users) so both the sheet & dashboard need to reside in this template library.  When I "Save as New" for the Dashboard from it's working folder, it keeps the links to the sheet in the working folder.  I've tried "Save as New" for the sheet (using both options with and without the cell links & hyperlinks setting option).  Unfortunately, no combination I've tried keeps the links to the sheet & dashboard together.  I've even tried "Save as New" the sheet FIRST but order doesn't seem to change the outcome.

Question #1 - Am I missing an "easy way" to copy these 2 objects to maintain their linking regardless of the folder or workspace?

If not, I have another question for what is minimal effort or best practice if I have to update all the data sources and reformat every widget on the dashboard:

Options I've explored:

* Update existing Dashboard in our template library (which already has links established for 98% of fields back to sheet).  However, I have to modify almost every widget on the dashboard for formats, spacing, headers, etc.
* Copy the redesigned version of the dashboard into our template library.  I would have to edit every data source in every widget on the dashboard and then because you loose formatting, I'll need to reapply all the formats

Question#2 - Are there any other options I should consider that are less manually intensive?

TYIA!

Paul Perger · Answer

If I am reading your issue correctly, I have accomplished this by doing the "Save As NEW…" step one level higher at the folder level.  This creates a "NEW Folder" that will be temporary and works very well if both sheets are in the same folder which you don't mention directly, but it sounds like they are.

From what I see, you have a NEW Dashboard, and it's NEW Source Document that need to be moved into a new template folder. How to do this is going to be completely dependent on where the Source Document gets its data and where the NEW document is going to get its data.

IF you have them in the same folder, AND that folder only contains these two documents, and the data document's source is not changing, you can save the folder via "Save As NEW" and select the option to have all the links change to the NEW documents in the new folder.  Then move the NEW Folder.

Paul Newcome · Answer

If you drop both the sheet and the dashboard into a folder, you can "save as new" on the folder to maintain the linking.