Formatting Question for Task Status Report

Robert Hawkey

Hello!

I'm hoping someone can give me some tips on formatting a report that I've built. It's essentially a list of every task that either started in the last 3 weeks, or is ending in the next 3 weeks across about a dozen project schedules. It also includes whether or not each task is "On Time", "Running Late" or "Overdue". The problem I'm having is that the report sheet won't let me format in any significant way so it's just a long list of about 100 tasks. I'd like to separate them out by project title, add header rows, color highlight etc. What's the best way to take the information from the report I've made and ending in a more digestible format?

I'm still fairly new to Smartsheet so apologies if there is a simple fix for this that I'm unaware of. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Rob

Frank Falco

The report editor is fairly limited. You cannot group or create headers within the editor.

The formatting of the report comes from the formatting within the sheets, so if you want to do any conditional formatting you have to do it within the sheet.

As for headers and sections, I have used a separate sheet for headers and groupings.Then combined the sheets and the headers sheet in the report writer.

You have to use columns that are common to all the sheets and/or some hidden columns for sorting. For this to work the columns need to be in all sheets. I also sometimes use a mapping sheet to determine what sorting values, usually numbers, are used across the sheets to group the headers and detail rows from the respective sheets.

It is a fiddly thing to do and can be awkward to maintain but it can be done.

This is difficult to explain and hope you get the idea.

Robert Hawkey

Thanks Frank! Yeah I think I get what you're saying. It sounds a little too fiddly for my liking though. I just ended up exporting to a formatted Excel doc. This will take a few copy/paste actions but it doesn't sound as complicated as trying to combine headers and tasks from multiple sheets. Thanks again!