Best practices when dealing with large amounts of reports

Ryan Nix

Good afternoon everyone,

I was curious to know what everyone's best practices are when it comes to managing a large number of reports and how to implement holistic changes?

We have dashboards designed for multiple locations and in those dashboards are reports that are filtering content from a sheet, filtered to those specific locations. This works fine when we don't need to make any changes but occasionally we will be asked to add/remove columns from the source sheet. This is where things become very labor intensive since we need to go through the 50+ dashboards/reports and update the columns to reflect the changes requested. This causes issues of people coming across reports where columns have not yet been added to their report and giving the perception that the reports are inaccurate during the time it takes to apply these changes.

One way we've looked into getting around this is utilizing Smartsheet's dynamic view and add everything to a single dashboard, giving the user the ability to filter for their location on their own so instead of having to update 50+ reports, we only need to update one. Though the issue that we are now running into is that people are unable to print out / export to excel from the dynamic view, specific to their location - which feels like we need to go back to the reports method.

Scale seems to be an issue that can take the simplest of things but cause it to be a very time consuming process and I'm curious to know what we can do differently to combat it.

Andrée Starå

Hi @Ryan Nix

A solution that would be perfect for this use-case is the premium add-on, Control Center.

Is that an option?

More info: 

https://www.smartsheet.com/marketplace/premium-apps/control-center

I hope that helps!

Be safe and have a fantastic weekend!

Best,

Andrée Starå

Workflow Consultant / CEO @ WORK BOLD

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