Remove all hierarchy (indents) from a sheet

eskaplan

Hi,

I have a sheet with about 500 rows, with a lot of hierarchy (indents) within it.

My ultimate goal is to be able to sort rows by one of my columns, and not have the indents alter how the rows are arranged after this sorting. Therefore I planned to create a new sheet where I removed all the hierarchy/indents (sort of reflattening my sheet), then sort by my column of choice. Is there a way to remove all indents? I am only finding descriptions where you outdent one row at a time.

Thank you!

Andrée Starå

Hi,

You could probably use a report instead if there isn't any other reason for using a sheet. 

Would that work for you?

Best,

Andrée Starå - Workflow Consultant @ Get Done Consulting 

eskaplan

Yes, that will work! Excellent, thank you

Andrée Starå

Happy to help!

Rashada Alexander

I have the same question re: removing all indents at once. A report alone with the Smartsheet in its current state will not meet all my needs, hence my desire to remove the indenting and rearrange the sheet. Any help or guidance you can give would be greatly appreciated.

Genevieve P.

Hi @Rashada Alexander

There are a few ways you can do this.

One way would be to collapse all rows, then open up each hierarchy, select all its child rows in one go, then outdent using the toolbar (see here).

Alternatively, if you just want to erase all hierarchy, you could insert a helper column. Then, Copy/Paste the entire content of the Primary column into this helper, so you keep your data associated with the correct row. Delete out the content from the Primary column so it's blank. Finally, Copy/Paste back the text from your helper column so it appears in the Primary again, and then remove this helper column from your sheet.

Let me know if you have questions about either of these options!

Cheers,

Genevieve

Loren C

Thanks @Genevieve P. this worked a treat!

Christiana Shields

I ran into this issue as well. I needed to reformat an existing sheet with lots of individual hierarchical groupings. The fix I came up with was to first create a helper column, "CountAncestors" and then used the following formula in that column and set it to be a column formula:

=COUNT(ANCESTORS())

All of my items had either one or two ancestors so this resulted in a 0, 1 or 2 for each row. I first filtered by the CountAncestors equal to 1, selected all of those rows and clicked the outdent button. I then changed it to filter by 2, selected all of those items and clicked the outdent button twice. If your sheet has additional levels of hierarchy, you would just repeat the process for each additional level.

This saved a tremendous amount of time. Otherwise I would have had to go through hundreds of individual groupings to manually remove each.

Hope someone else will find this useful!