Is there a solutions gallery?

gonzzo

I am in the trial phase and I like smartsheets.

However, I am overwhelmed with the many *single* or standalone sheet templates available. 

Unfortunately, I did not find any "complete" workspace templates with interconnected sheets and reports and sights. Probably you would call that a solution?

Is there a way to import a few example workspaces/solutions from a solution template library which show me some more features of smartsheets and especially how combined data from a variety of sheets work?

I would be interested in a demo/test environment that more or less provides the following:

- A folder that contains tracking sheets (for me that would be "work orders") of some sort (some kind of very simple project status tracking sheet) 

- the tracking sheets (work orders) contain dates, resources, some comment fields, a status field, some numbers, etc.

- there will be constantly new work order sheets added to that folder

- A report (or sheet?) that combines some key information from those tracking sheets into lines of data

- When I add a new tracking sheet (work order), the report(sheet?) is automatically updated (a new line is added?)

- A sight that contains summarized data from the reporting(sheet?), like the number of lines in a specific time period, some information related to status (i.e. how many  work orders are in status 1, 2, 3, etc.)

I hope you understand my question. 

I see a lot of great "standalone" templates but I miss examples that actually interconnect all the possibilities (sheets, reports, sights, etc.) in a demo workspace.

Is there a workspaces demo gallery where I can import some examples from to learn about the worksheets a bit better?

Thanks

Daniel

Andrée Starå

Hi Daniel, 

To my knowledge there isn't a workspaces demo gallery.

I'd happily work with you and help you with setting up a solution tailored to your specific needs.

If you'd like we can book a time for a free discovery call and take it from there. How does that sound?

I'm based in Europe/Sweden so it will be remotely if that works for you.

Have a fantastic week! 

Best regards 

Andrée 

Mike Wilday

To add a bit to Andree's offer of an exploratory call (which I am sure would be beneficial) I wanted to add that I also am unaware of a Solutions Gallery. The community does a great job of helping fellow users, but there is not a find a full-solution gallery available for your needs. 

Just for information's sake: Smartsheets do not interact well with each other. Unlike Google Sheets or Excel, there are limited ways to make sheets interact with other. The most common method is cell-linking. But it is a highly manual process. There have been talks from Smartsheet Development about setting up the ability to do a LookUp formula between separate Smartsheets. There is no declared release date, but I believe they see the importance of separate sheets interacting with each other beyond a manual linking process. 

Reports are useful for gathering like-data into a single report. For instance, we have 10 different programs at our university each run by different Assistant Deans. They work within their silos and spreadsheets but we are able to take the group of content from the 10 different sheets and combine them into a single report. We also use reports to aggregate and filter tasks by certain criteria within the reports.

There are also 3rd-party options for making sheets talk with each other. Zapier and Azuqua are a couple that I have heard of.

Hope that helps! 

 

Tony Coleman

I seem to recall they had a Multi-Project Dashboard available (mainly to showcase Sights, so you'll need that in your subscription).   Shows a number of project sheets, feeding reports that ultimately feed a dashboard.  Nifty enough, but quite simple compared to what the tool can do in the real world.

 

It was installed from the Smartsheet site from vague recollection.

Matt Stofka

Check out the Smartsheet Webinar Hub.  It's a great resource I just learned about recently for downloadable solutions and live/recorded webinars.

The Personal Dashboard Power Hour slide deck, for example, contains a link to the example Sights/sheets/reports used in the recorded session; all of it downloads to a folder in your Sheets folder in Smartsheet.  Pretty cool...and a good resource to see how these things all tie together.

The Executive Dashboards Webinar has something similar.

Matt

 

gonzzo

Thanks folks for your input.

I gather that smartsheets would not be able to gather information from a growing number of sheets? Is that correct? 

With other words, if I had a new sheet per work order, I could not summarize the content of all work order sheets into one sheet or report? Am I getting that correctly? 

Yet, if I would use just one sheet and add a line item per work order (and manipulate the content of that line(s) through a form, for example), would that work for a report and sight then?

I try to understand the way I could use smartsheets and save that company from having to build a complex system, just to record some information along many almost identical construction type of activities. At the end it looks like a very simple project plan per work order, just that I do not plan but record key information for about 3 milestones.

Information that I want to summarize based on filters like date range, resource needs over time, key information fields and so on.. 

On the first glance, smartsheets looked ideal.. but now I am less convinced.. :-(

Dan

 

Andrée Starå

Hi again Dan,

You can absolutely have one sheet per work order and summarize on another sheet or a report. 

You can also use one line per work order and that would also work with a report and sight.

Both options above is achievable with thorough planning of the solution.

To recommend the best solution for you i would need some more information. 

Let me convince you that Smartsheet is indeed ideal for your use case!

I hope this helps you!

Best,

Andrée

Andrée Starå

Hi Dan,

How did it go? Did you manage to get something set up?

Best,

Andrée Starå - Workflow Consultant @ Get Done