Building a sheet to best populate dashboards

Amanda Crawford

Do you have any training material you can share on “best practices” for building a project plan/timeline to populate Dashboards correctly (e.g. metrics and tables).

Examples of things I want to do: Present the overall project health as red, yellow, green; sum of late tasks; sum of tasks in progress and on-track; sum of tasks remaining; sum of open issues, etc.

Earl Bennett

The one best practice that I would recommend is to be consistent with your sheets, especially if you plan to reuse dashboards you create for future projects.

Once I created the sheets I needed for a project, I created the dashboard and saved the folder structure to be used as a template.

I've attached a dashboard that I'm using for a project that I just kicked off.  This dashboard, all of the underlying sheets and reports, took about 5 seconds to create simply by selecting the saved folder and doing a save as new.  The attachment also contains some notes for your reference.

Hope this helps...

 

 

 

Amanda Crawford

Thank you, this is really helpful!

Is there a "best practice" for how you built the project plan sheet to populate the project and schedule widget?

rachmavis

How did you change the look of the report to resemble a notepad?

Genevieve P.

@rachmavis

It looks like this Report is based off an underlying sheet that has a Yellow background applied to all columns/rows. Then the Report is put on the Dashboard using the Report widget.

Let me know if that makes sense or if you'd like to see some screen captures on how to set that up!

Cheers,

Genevieve

rachmavis

@Genevieve P. Thank you. It wold be nice if we could format reports instead of relying on the formatting of the sheet.