Importing Sheet Summary Information into Tableau

Daniel Kent

We use Smartsheets to manage a wide variety of projects and have leveraged the Sheet Summary feature to capture metadata (e.g. Customer, Project Sponsor, Priority, Effort, Value, PM, Start and End Dates, ...) about each of these projects to allow us to build program and portfolio reports.

We've built a Sheet Summary Report in SS to provide a basic "dashboard" for our leadership team. Works great, but we wish to have this data in Tableau to allow more advanced graphics and dynamic filtering.

I attempted to use the Web Data Connector to pull this Sheet Summary Report into Tableau, and received an error message. I worked with the Tableau and SS Support teams and found that the WDC does not currently support Sheet Summary Reports. The SS Support team filed an enhancement request on my behalf.

Note that I am able to successfully pull Row Reports into Tableau using the WDC.

Until the enhancement request is completed, I need a solution to allow me to pull this Sheet Summary Report into Tableau. I tried the quick hack of exporting the report into Excel and then pulling that into Tableau - this works, but is a very manual process.

Has anyone faced this same issue and possibly solved it?

Thanks!

Nathan Lloyd

Hi Daniel,

At this time the export to Excel option would likely be the best solution. You can automate this to a degree by scheduling a "Send as Attachment" for the Sheet Summary reports you need so you don't need to manually export those. See the article Share a Report as an Attachment in Email if needed.

From there you could connect to a file as a data source in Tableau (using the Excel export for your Sheet Summary report), and could simply replace the older version of the file with the new one as needed, then refresh the data source in Tableau and you should see the updated information.

You may be able to automate this further if you can find some way to automatically download the exports sent to your email and move them into the file directory where the older version is (note that the older version would need to be replaced and the new file name would need to match the original file name). I did a quick search and this does seem like a possibility using either 3rd party add-ons (with Outlook for example) or using tools like VBA.

See the forums below for more information on that:

• https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/lync/en-US/f7a39b7a-6128-4e9a-a5f7-31e30de62069/outlook-rule-saving-attachments?forum=outlook
• https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/lync/en-US/f7a39b7a-6128-4e9a-a5f7-31e30de62069/outlook-rule-saving-attachments?forum=outlook

Hope that's helpful!

Best,

Nathan L.

Sheila Dilley

Hi Daniel,

I'm not super familiar with the Tableau connection and am actually digging into this myself as well. I do know, if you are not required to use Tableau, that PowerBI has the ability to connect to the sheet summary report. I did all of my dashboarding through sheet summary reports and API connections in my previous role. It's worth looking into if you aren't required to use Tableau!

Best,

Sheila

Andrew Stills

Sheila,

I have been trying to connect to a summary sheet report using PowerBI and have been unable to do so.

Are you using the Desktop version or the web-based version? In my experience the desktop version of the smartsheet connector will not perform the connection. My company policies do not allow me to use the PBI web-based connector.

Could this be the difference?

Wanjiru Ngige

Hi Andrew,

I'm experiencing the same issue with PowerBi, and am unable to pull in sheet summary reports (using the desktop application).

Have you found a solution to this?

Andrew Stills

Ms. Ngige,

I produced a work around of sorts... the long of it can be found on another thread I started, which can be found here: https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/71583/cant-pull-report-of-summary-sheet-fields-into-power-bi-using-connector-or-excel-using-live-data#latest

It produces the result I need but is not very elegant. I have not found another way to address it directly in Smartsheet.

Feel free to DM me if you need more explanation.

Andrew