Linked Cells and Indentation

I'm pretty new to Smartsheet so please forgive any ignorance I may have.

I have a program with three providers managing their portion of the program. I want to have each provider maintain their own schedule in their own sheet and have a master sheet that includes all the tasks that I'm managing as well as links to all the tasks in their plans. That way, we all control our own schedules and don't have to work out of the same sheet.

However, when I use cell linking to include tasks from the other sheets (task name, start, finish, etc.), I lose the indentation associated with the Task Name column. Obviously, this makes it very difficult to see the hierarchy of the tasks from the other sheets.

Is there any way to accomplish this?

Thanks much for any feedback you can provide.

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Cell linking

Comments

J. Craig Williams

Mark,

Are the providers adding tasks to their portion or only updating the existing tasks/rows?

Craig

Mark Kennedy

Craig,

They may be adding tasks as the project goes along.

Thanks,

Mark

J. Craig Williams

Mark,

That rules out a single sheet with the providers doing their updates from individual Reports. (They still would need to be shared to the underlying sheet, but normal ops would be via the Report)

Adding links will be a pain and you will likely run into the limit (500 incoming links, IRCC)

You could try building a report to bring the four sheets together (3 providers' and yours). This will also lose the hierarchy.

I'm afraid you might be out of luck here.

What I have done in the past is have a Master schedule that showed the overview (major milestones and tasks). These flowed DOWN (via links) to the another more detailed schedules (by engineer or team) where the WBS was broken down into the activity lists. The activities were linked back up to the Master schedule so that when things started to shift to the right, the Master schedule would show the slippage.

I don't currently have an example but it was fairly simple to set up and most of the maintenance was done by the task holders. I'm not sure that will help, but I figured it won't hurt to mention it.

Craig

Mark Kennedy

Craig

thanks for the feedback. That's kind of where I was heading in my thinking. Thanks a lot for your insight.

Mark

J. Craig Williams

Always glad to help.

Craig

Taru

Hi Craig,

I am new to Smartsheet but am trying to handle exactly the same issue as was mentioned by Mark. Would there be any video that could help show me exactly what do to.

Many thanks for in advance.

Kind regards,

Taru