The basics: budget privacy/ combining multiple into one/

Josh M.

Smartsheet Team,

We just joined after debating Smartsheet for over a month....  We are watching videos and reading, but our questions are so basic in may be better to ask the community:

 

1.  We need to lead a design team for a construciton project, I would prefer to have one sheet for the planning and construction budgetting.  How would I hide the estimated budget from the view of the collaborators on the design side?

 

2.  If we have serveral sheets related to the same project: Design+Construction+Marketing++++ do we have ways for the task lists to integrate from the various sheets?  Any other ways to be efficient with a complex project?

 

 

Joel Johnson

One way we have done this is create multiple custom reports based on the master sheet for each group or individual so they only see what they need to see.  I do wish there was a way in the sheet to hide certain columns or rows based on who is logged in.

 

Reports can also help you combined multiple sheets into one overall view.

Zack S

Hello Josh, 

 

1. Currently there isn't a way to hide certain portions of the sheet from a user you've shared the sheet with, but I'll add your vote for this capability to our enhancement request list. If the collaborators don't need to edit the data, you can build a report that hides certain data as Joel mentioned above. You could then publish the report to a read only verison that you could share with users. Here is our help link on creating reports: http://help.smartsheet.com/customer/portal/articles/522214, and publishing reports and/or sheets: http://help.smartsheet.com/customer/portal/articles/522078

 

If the users need to edit the data this option won't work. In order to edit the data they would need to be shared to the source sheet. You could advise users to only look at the report so they don't see the extra information, but they could technically open that sheet if they wish as it would have to be shared to them. If the source sheet isn't shared to them the report you create won't show any data when they view the report. 

 

2. Creating a report would be the best function to pull information from multiple sheets/projects into one location, as Joel mentioned. 

 

-Zack

Tim Rich

Hello Zack S,

 

We have a similar need to share sheets with collaborators from whom we want some columns hidden, so please also add my vote for this capability to your enhancement request list as well.

 

For us, it is necessary for collaborators to update a variety of cells along with maintaining visibility of all the rows to understand project scope. However, we frequently update a few columns for tracking work that we'd like to hide from their view. All of these needs make row update requests, read-only sheets/reports, and/or multiple reports either an impossibility or much more work to manage.

 

Our current solution is to hide those columns, which an editor cannot unhide. However, this is not a fantastic solution for two reasons. First, since we might adjust the values in those columns multiple times a day, it's a considerable nusiance to unhide -> change -> hide each time we update it. Second, collaborators could be on the sheet when we need to adjust the column, so unhiding the column would make it available to them.

 

So, the ability to make a column always available to us but permanently hidden to collaborators would be an immense boon.

Ashraf Shalaby

Please add my vote to this: we need to be able to hide columns permentaly for users. It would be beneficial to be able to have permision on the columns level - as it's now on the sheet level.