Project updates

Dan Engerer

Hi. I need a way to post project updates (such as weekly meeting key points) on my project tracking documents. This is to keep team members updated on the latest happenings of a project. 

The obvious solution is to simply create a dedicated row towards the top of a sheet and place the news in a cell. But, because smartsheet formatting still sucks many years after requests have been made to improve it (such as lock rows, extend row height, show line breaks in cell preview, etc.), it looks like garbage and is more or less unreadable when you have more than 1 update in a cell.

Of course, I don't want to create an ever-growing list of updates at the top of a sheet, because it will start to crowd out the actual sheet purpose - to see tasks, etc. And I don't want to put this update list at the bottom of a sheet because nobody will scroll down to read it. 

What are some best practices to share project updates with team members in Smartsheet? 

Andrée Starå

Hi Dan,

Maybe you could use sheet comments or connect to Google docs or another service. Another option could be to have a dashboard.

Would that work for you?

I hope this helps you!

Best,

Andrée Starå - Workflow Consultant @ Get Done

Dan Engerer

Hi Andree. Comments is not a bad idea actually, thank you. The appearance is not so slick, but that's kind of a general theme with Smartsheet. I believe SS badly needs a facelift. 

Andrée Starå

Happy to help!

You could attach/link a document there also or as a sheet attachment instead. 

J. Craig Williams

Careful what you wish for. The UX update in Feb 2018 did not go over well.

Craig

Mike L.

Can you use your idea of a single row to post your status update.  Indent all past updates so that you can collapse the "status updates" to a single row so that it doesn't distract from the rest of your sheet.  Collaborators can expand/collapse the row to read the history. When collapsed it won't distract from the primary project contents.

Paul Newcome

You could also put the updates on a separate sheet with a hyperlink to said sheet for anyone who wants to view any past notes.

Then you could use a VLOOKUP(MAX function to look for the latest date on the updates sheet (whether you use created, modified, or manual entry is up to you) and display the corresponding row notes across the top of your sheet.

 

That will give you the most current update across the top of your sheet while decreasing your clutter and tracking all past updates.

 

I like the Sheet Comments idea as well, but there is no "+1" or highlighted icon to let you know that there is a new sheet level comment.