Showing Parent/Child relationships in Reports.

Christine Phillips

I created a Report so I could have a simplified view of a schedule sheet to print to PDF and include in the appendix of an actual PDF report I need to submit to the client. I noticed though that the report does not show the Parent child relationships. I know I can also hide columns in the sheet itself and print it that way, but I wanted something quick that could be used by anyone on our team even if they are not the sheet admin. I don't think people who are shared to a sheet with edit rights can hide columns. Any thoughts?

Sheet snip:

Report snip:

Paul Newcome

Unfortunately you have run into one of the limitations of Smartsheet. I see though that you do have conditional formatting/highlighting to show parent rows, etc.

Another option would be to implement a WBS system.

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There are a few WBS solutions floating around here in the community. If you weren't too worried about the full WBS system, you could use symbols to show how many times a particular row has been indented.

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Either way... Feel free to Submit a Product Enhancement Request regarding showing the indentation in Reports as it would be a great feature.

Paul Newcome

Unfortunately you have run into one of the limitations of Smartsheet. I see though that you do have conditional formatting/highlighting to show parent rows, etc.

Another option would be to implement a WBS system.

1

1.1

1.2

1.3

2

2.1

2.1.1

2.1.2

2.2

3

There are a few WBS solutions floating around here in the community. If you weren't too worried about the full WBS system, you could use symbols to show how many times a particular row has been indented.

->

-> ->

-> ->

-> ->

->

-> ->

-> -> ->

-> -> ->

-> ->

->

Either way... Feel free to Submit a Product Enhancement Request regarding showing the indentation in Reports as it would be a great feature.

familyguy3322

Thank you very much for the background information on this one. I may give the structure you note above a try to see how it works out.

Paul Newcome

Happy to help. 👍️

If you have any trouble finding/figuring out either of the above solutions, feel free to let me know, and I will be happy to help you with one of them.

Christine Phillips

I added to the conditional formatting for the summaries. I looked at some of the WBS solutions and they looked a little complicated. I have a column called "Task Type" that i have the following tasks:

I use the Project Summary (top level), Project Phase (i.e. - Project Initiation, Design Phase, etc), and Task Summary for the conditional formatting. Then I use Document Submission, General Task and Site Work as filters in a report to list our tasks for ALL projects without seeing Milestone and summary tasks. This will work for now! Thanks.

Paul Newcome

Happy to help. 👍️

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Vadim K

If this is still monitored and for others who stumble on this article, simulating the hierarchy in another text column has an issue with grouping.

If I understand the suggestion, the basic idea is to have a helper column that uses the primary column and prepends as many indent prefixes as there are levels for the given row. Than use that new column in the report hiding the primary column.

If you happen to add a grouping to such report, the group header will be displayed in the primary column of the group row and therefore will be hidden should the primary column be hidden.

Unless the suggestion is to use a separate column with hierarchy prefixes leaving the primary column flat. Truly dirty hack.

Paul Newcome

@Vadim K The solutions above were pre-grouping in reports. Since the grouping and summary features in reports have rolled out, it does make it much less clean when combining the two.