Parent Row in Report

I have a scheduling sheet that I use to keep track of each project manager's pre construction timelines. Each project manager has a sheet to keep track of multiple projects. I have created each project as a parent row with children rows with each task for the referenced project. I am trying to create a report that shows our GM what projects have upcoming review dates. The only thing referencing the project is if the parent row is included in the report. Is this possible?

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Andrée Starå

Hi Jill,

Yes, If I understand you correctly.

You'd probably need to add a helper column to your sheets (depending on the structure of your sheets).

Can you describe your process in more detail and maybe share the sheet(s) or some screenshots? That would make it easier to help. (share too, andree@getdone.se)

Hope that helps!

Have a fantastic week!

Best,

Andrée Starå

Workflow Consultant @ Get Done Consulting

Jill Youngberg

I have done that before on a sheet I think. Is it where you create a checkbox helper column, to be checked if the row is a parent row? And then include rows that are checked in the report?

Andrée Starå

That's one way to do it. Another is to add automatic levels (parent, children and so on) and in that way, you can select to only include the top row.

Best,

Andrée

Mattias

Seem to stumble upon these needs that ends up with some helper columns and stuff...

Looking for a way, like in the filter function in a sheet, to include the parent row of a filitered result in the report view.

Anotehr one for the wish list - hope that Smartsheet implements - invisible feature request list?

Donte really understand why i have to keep track of what is a parent row when the sheet apparently already has this information and can handle it "project view"...

/Mattias

Andrée Starå

Hi Mattias,

Great idea! That would be a great addition to Smartsheet features.

Please submit an Enhancement Request when you have a moment.

I hope that helps!

Have a fantastic week!

Best,

Andrée Starå

Workflow Consultant / CEO @ WORK BOLD

Jovon Staveland

Who knows, maybe someone might find this useful.

I completely agree that more control over ancestor/descendant display in reports is a needed feature.

But In the meantime, I use a fairly simple workaround that does enough for my needs: I just added a column to my sheet named "parent" and just pasted =(PARENT([column name]@row)) into the whole column (I thought just =(Parent()) would be sufficient, but that only worked some of the time, and just using the other formula was simpler than trying to figure out why); then just hid the column on the sheet and then included it in the report and moved it over to the left side, it just comes up blank if there are no parent rows.

It wouldn't work for everyone (like if you needed to see the entire parent row and not just the name, but for me at least it generally suffices), and the more granularity you need over what information you need, the more complicated the formula would have to get. You could do it for child, grandparent, etc., too, obviously. You can also do this multiple times for different columns, though the more of those you do the more cluttered and less useful it gets.

For what it's worth, there is one big plus for me to this solution, which is that it gives the info I need without adding any actual additional rows to the report. Including all the parents could up to double a report length which is lot more to go through if you only need limited information from the other rows; this gives me what I need without making the report longer.

Again, if you need to be able to see the all or at least large amounts of information from the other row, this doesn't really help but, if you just needed a limited amount of information from a parent/other row, it's not bad.

Christina Bayma

@Andrée Starå you mentioned

"add automatic levels (parent, children and so on) and in that way, you can select to only include the top row."

I have sheets setup with dependencies enabled, is that what you mean by automatic levels? In my sheets, I indent the row below the parent so that it becomes the child. Now for my report, I'd like to only see the parent rows. I'm not understanding from your response above, just how to "include the top row" only. Would you please elaborate?

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Sarah3030

@Jovon Staveland

Yes! I found that incredibly helpful! Thanks for the great tip.

G1NCHY

This one is easy.

Add a hidden helper formula column in your sheet that will calculate the Parent Task for that row.

Example of the formula below where [Task Name] is a column name in my sheet.

=PARENT([Task Name]@row)

In your Report, use the group tool to group by the helper column.

This will present the filtered tasks by the parent.

= Week (today()) & " - "& PARENT([Task Name]@row) to sort the Parent Rows by date

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