Are there best practices for formatting a sheet such that the data is useful for analysis in excel?

Chandler Packard

I am hoping to use smartsheet to capture some user data related to project planning. When I export my view to excel, the data requires significant manipulation in order for the parent and children rows to align such that I can analyze the data using pivot tables, etc. I am hoping that there may be some best practices or workarounds to allow for my formatting in smartsheet to export cleanly into excel without the need for the additional manipulation.

My example in more detail. I have a project with several skills that sit as children. I have those children rows as a separate column. When I export, the parent (project name in this example) it sits on a separate line from the children and thus is not associated with the children in excel. I would have to copy that parent down to the children rows for all of my projects. I hope this makes sense.

L_123

There are several things you can do to improve on this, 2 that come to the top of my head atm are using a dedicated column to identify parent columns, then you can use the inbuilt excel functionality to single them out.

A second thing that you might try is to ODBC connect rather than export.

http://smartsheet-platform.github.io/odbc-docs/

This will keep the data live, and make it so you only have to do the work once. After you have it set up on your computer, it is fairly simple to create and edit connections.