Report Building with Dashboard Publishing

Steve S

I have started developing a report.

Is it necessary to create the data sheet (which will drive the report) in a seperate smartsheet from where all my entries are or is it OK to build the data on the same smartsheet by adding columns and then hiding ?

Andrée Starå

Hi Steve,

It depends!

There are many factors to weigh in what would work best.

• What do you want to show?
• How clean do you want the main sheet to be?
• Will you add other sheets to the report later?
• And more...

Hope that helps!

Have a fantastic weekend!

Best,

Andrée Starå

Workflow Consultant @ Get Done Consulting

Alejandra

Hi Steve,

It's not necessary to create a separate source sheet for your report —you can certainly report off hidden columns. However, keep in mind hiding is not a security feature. Collaborators with Editor and Viewer access won't be able to unhide the columns within Smartsheet, but they can export the sheet to Excel or send it as an Excel attachment and un-hide the columns from that program.

If needed, more information on this can be found in our help article: https://help.smartsheet.com/articles/504696-hiding-unhiding-columns