Dashboards

Ellen Friedman

Hi All - I am trying to create a dashboard to be shared with the team(s). Something with colors would be great! A list of all the projects and their status in a graph (or pie chart). Something with colors would be great!

Any ideas?

Tim Meeks

Ellen,

 

I may be a little slow, but something tells me you want the dashboard to be colorful. 

 

SS is rolling out some enhahcements to the Dashboard hopefully before the end of the year.  Maybe it will include what you are asking for.

 

Here's all the product road map says. https://www.smartsheet.com/product-roadmap 

 But I received a survey from SS 3-4 weeks ago and although I'm not sure about the colors, it may be able to do the functional project tracking you are wanting. And in talking with support, they referenced it will be a great tool to do project tracking.

 

For single projects there is an app that integrates with smartsheet that may help you create colorful reporting status.  https://www.smartsheet.com/apps/officetimeline

 

Tim

Ellen Friedman

Thank you, Tim! That was very helpful!

Travis

Tim is correct, improved dashboards are coming! I dont have any details I can provide at the moment but we are working hard to get this released by the end of the year. 

Scott Fuller

Hi Ellen - I am the product manager responsible for the upcoming dashboard feature.  We will work hard to make sure that they support lots of colors .  Feel free to reach out to me directly if you would like to discuss your requirements and if the upcoming features will provide what you need.

Ellen Friedman

Thank you all so much for responding!  I am looking forward to creating bright, easy to understand dashboards!

Tim DeBellis

Hi Scott,

 

Like Ellen, I too am looking to use smartsheet for creating a visually appealing exec level type dashboard. Will the new features allow you to customize the dashboard with multiple "widgets"? For example, I would like to see summary views of overall % complete, open risks and issues at each level (H/M/L) represented in a bar graph, pending decisions by aging represented by a column graph, and various other project metrics - all in a graphically pleasing format. I think you get the picture (no pun intended).

 

We were contemplating Tableau as an overlay but would prefer to leverage the native features before taking this approach.

 

Thanks in advance for your reply.

Scott Fuller

Hi Tim,

 

Our first release of dashboards will support 6 different widget types. Based upon customer feedback we are trying to solve three key problems. First is surfacing key metrics from sheet data and second is easily navigating to the right sheets and reports and third and surfacing additional content that might be relevant to the data in the sheets.

 

Here is an example; we have a customer that uses Smartsheet to organize all of their HR data. It includes, PTO requests, employee lists, department contacts, etc. All of this data is distributed across many different sheets and there is even a sheet that describes all of the data in the other sheets. With our new dashboard functionality, they will be able to have a dashboard that summarizes metrics like number of employees, upcoming holidays, links to a form to submit a PTO request as well as links to the employee handbook and other important HR resources. This is not your traditional dashboard but it is a very useful dashboard for surfacing and navigating information in Smartsheet.

 

Another example is a project portfolio dashboard. Based on data in sheets I can highlight total number of projects in the portfolio, how many of those projects are on track, a project level report with Gantt showing start and finish dates and much more. This dashboard could include links to the detailed project sheets or links a project charter document in Box. These are just a few examples.

 

One thing to note is that in the first release there will not be charts. We are working on this capability but they will not be ready in time for the first dashboard release. Based on customer feedback there is so much value in the 6 widgets we are releasing it was not worth waiting for the charts widgets. I am happy to answer more questions if you have them.

 

Scott

Tim Meeks

Scott those functions sound very good. Any ETA on this first release?

 

thanks,

Tim

Tim DeBellis

Thanks for the reply Scott.

 

Agree w/ Tim. This new functionality will get us much closer to where we would like to be.

 

We are preparing now for a year-long implementation project that is scheduled to kick-off mid Feb. Any chance the dashboard capabilities will be in place before then?

 

Thanks,

Tim

Scott Fuller

We are targeting a private beta in January and general release by the end of Q1.  

Tim Meeks

Us Tims are good at keeping secrets.   And of course Ellen was what got this whole conversation going.....

Terri Pavlovic

Scott - are you looking for volunteers to be part of the beta? I'm interested.

Kapil Shah

Hello Scott Fuller, It is will certainly add more capability of SS with dash board. Do you have plans to cover Business Intelligency tools?  I mean each sheet and report can be configured for business intelligence and analysis by user / editor. If required,  we can discuss further on this.

Scott Fuller

Anyone interested in participating in the dashboard private beta can sign up here:

 

https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form?EQBCT=5a44d0da88c546e995719136744b9116

 

 

Scott Fuller

Kapil,

 

To answer your question about BI tools.  It is our goal to be able to provide visualization and basic analytics within our dashboards.  These capabilities will not all be in V1 of dashboards but we will continue to expand what our users can do with Smartsheet Dashboards.  We are not however trying to create an advanced BI tool like Tableau or PowerBI.  For our users with more advanced analytics needs we offer integrations via our live connector or via direct in app integrations.