Linking Sheets

Francois Korf

Thought I will just share this with everyone to show how powerful smartsheet is. I have just set up a medium sized project where I will have 3 different teams running their respective phases across numerous sites. Each team needs to know the status of the other teams work in order to schedule their own work

 

From their respective sheets, it is all linked back to the master sheet that is maintained by the Project Manager and which is also the sheet our client will view. Had a meeting with the team and the client this morning and the feedback was great when they could see the interaction between the sheets and the amount of information available to everyone.

 

Certainly makes it easier to control these sorts of projects!

Dayna Waytashek

Francois, thanks for sharing. So the information is updated by each team within their sheets and that information is then rolled up into the sheet that the Project Manager maintains? So how is the Project Manager maintaining their sheet? Just curious, because we are doing something similar but does not seem to be working like we would like it to. 

 

I would very interested in seeing how you have this laid out. 

Dan Davis

I am doing something very similar.  My group works from a long list of smaller scope, fast paced projects.  I built a "spreadsheet" as the master project list.  Projects are entered across a row, columns are for a variety of project information.  I prepared "reports" for each of my team members which displays the projects assigned to the respective project coordinator, with only the project info (columns) that are relative to their input.  Each project coordinator will update the project information on their respective "reports", which automatically updates the master "spreadsheet".  The really cool thing about this is that my project coordinators can be updating simultaneously.  That can't happen on an Excel spreadsheet without loosing data.  The risk of loosing data on Smartsheet is when two individuals update the same cell.  But since the reports are sorted by the "Assigned To" column, then no two people are seeing the same cells on their reports.

Scott Withington

I would also like to see how you do this. I am trying to figure out how to have different subsets of a larger data set. (tracking vehicle accidents, but have different departments see only the accidents for their department.) Neither linking nor reporting seems ideal for this.

 

JohnHinkle

Scott, why wouldnt reports work for you? A report can pull in only accidents for a specific department (from a single or multiple sheetS). You can edit the data right from the report and send the report as a PDF on a recurring basis.

Scott Withington

we want the department contacts to be able to modify the sheet of info from their department, for example attach an accident report or fill out a form to add a new accident. I considered separate sheets for each department, but that might get to be a headache to keep track of. 

 

What he sounded like he was describing with a master and sub sheets sounds close to what I am trying to achieve.

 

 

JohnHinkle

You can edit the sheet data from a report, the only limitation is you cannot add new rows to sheets from the report.

Scott Withington

 

 

 

Angie Hatfield

I am fairly new to linking cells.

I have Department A using a sheet to track incoming work.

I have Department B using another sheet to track account deactivations.

 

What i tried to do is link Dept B data to filter in to Dept A sheet..

 

What happened is that Dept A had to remove link to add their own data and then when Dept B added data to theirs, it then won't link over to Dept A.

 

How do I get them to link next available cell? Is that possible?

 

Thank you