Add blank row in Report?

Chris182

Hi,

 

I have a report that lists all tasks "due today" from different parent subjects.

 

Is there a way to automaticlly insert an empty row in between each "subject" so the report does not looked so cramped?

 

Thanks.

 

Tony Davidson - SmartSheet Certified User 2016

 no sure about an automation..but you could just add blank rows to the sheet you're pulling into the report 

Shaine Greenwood

Hi Chris,

 

There isn't a way to create blank rows into a report, and it may take some work for you to be able to pull in a blank row from a source sheet and sort the rows in your report to get the blank row where you want.

 

I'll get your vote down for a way to add blank rows in a report directly on our enhancement request list for further consideration.

Chris182

Thanks Shane.

-Chris

J. Craig Williams

Chris,

 

Depending on your data set, this is certainly possible.

All you need is to define how your data will appear (sort order) on the sheet side, which might take a bit of doing and then add rows that have no data in the displayed data but do have data in criteria data and Bob's your uncle.

 

Here's an example (before)

 

Hope this gets you started.

 

Craig

Doug Carr

Please excuse the ignorance on my part, I am extremely new to Smartsheet. I too, would like to insert blank rows into my reports, but I do not see adding blank rows to the underlying sheet(s) as a viable solution. This then requires the same vigilance when working with the underlying sheets to get the blank rows in the correct places. With the sheets I'm working with, that are quite dynamic and edited by at least five other people this just doesn't seem practical. I'd much rather see more power in the report formatting capabilities that allow us to group and insert group headers and the like. Or, perhaps I am missing the point of reports and this is more the domain of Sights with underlying Reports???

J. Craig Williams

carr,

As you have discovered, for some use cases, the suggestion I outlined won't work (well). 

If the sheets are changing a lot, I would not bother. My use case was comparing two fairly static sheets -- an actual and an estimated project plan.

My take on Reports (Smartsheet) and Reports (not) (long*)

They are slightly misnamed. Some of us think of a Report as a finished, official document - a product I deliver to my superiors on the state of the team's goals, for example. And Reports can and are used for this. However, Smartsheet's Reports are not a static document like a sheet or a word document. It is a "live" view of the data as it currently is when I open the Report or refresh it. In this view, it is reporting the current state, but is not a Report that is polished, to be stored away as an archive. Kind of. There is a nuance there that may be hard to get across without a few edits on my part.

Imagine if you will cutting and pasting data from your various spreadsheets and putting them into a Google Doc with further explanation, perhaps, an image or two, a chart or six, etc... You get that Doc looking exactly the way you want it to and then someone adds 5 tasks and a new image. To update the Doc is going to take a bit of time because each bit of data has meaning within the context of how it visually appears in the Report you are preparing.

In Smartsheet, to give us this functionality, the Report would need to be MORE static because not only is a row with the defined columns a part of the data, but now it has meaning in relation to the other rows that are retrieved. And that, in my opinion is going to be touch to develop and remove a lot of the appeal (for me) of being able to generate quickly 3 or 5 or 10 Reports off the same sheet(s) to provide different views of the data.

If I had to worry about row 13 from sheet A being two rows above row 37-50 from sheet B, I'd go (more**) nuts.

So what I think people are asking for when they ask for a Report, they are really talking about a small subset of the Reports that are possible.

Craig

* This is longer than I thought it would be when I started typing. I had only a few minutes but my anticipated phone call never came.

** If that is possible.