Hiding Blank Reports on a Dasboard

David Dolch

I have project level executive summary dashboards that have a number of reports on them that quite frequently have no data - Open Issues, Escalated Item, etc.

Is there any way to hide / remove the widget when the report is empty. It is not the best looking report for an EVP to look at when it shows a heading "OPEN ISSUES" with a number of column headers listed, and then nothing below it. It would be much cleaner just to have the entire section not displayed

Paul Newcome

That is not currently possible, but it would be a nice feature to have. Feel free to Submit a Product Enhancement Request when you are able.

Mark Cronk

I agree with Paul. It would be a nice feature. I run into your issue frequently and have resorted to editing the dashboard to remove gaps and blank reports before a presentation. An automatic sizing optiom would be helpful. Thanks for contributing to the Community.

Mark

David Dolch

@Mark Cronk Unfortunately I do not know when somebody is going to be looking at a dashboard.

I am running a Control Center instance where I have upwards of 100 active projects in flight at any given time. Control Center creates an Executive Dashboard for each one. The dashboards are automatically populated with items based on what the project manager is doing on the project plan, risk register, and other sheets. Our Executives are supposed to be able to look at the Executive Dashboard at any time to see the status of a project and any issues. Unfortunately many times they see what looks like an embarrassing mess because there are blank sections, and poor formatting.

The dashboards look great when data is specifically 'designed' to look good on them, but if that is level of effort it takes to make a good looking dashboard it kind of defeats the whole automation thing.

I'll put in another feature request and watch them implement things like a password strength meter instead.

Paul Newcome

@David Dolch You could add in a small metrics widget next to each report that shows the total count of how many rows should be in that report. That way if you see a zero then that corresponds to a blank report instead of wondering if the report is broken.

David Dolch

@Paul Newcome I appreciate the ideas, but that would be even worse.

Right now I get a big box in the middle of my dashboard that says "All Data is Filtered Out, to see data try editing the report" or something along those line.

Now if I add a widget, it will still show the same thing, but will also have a big "0" next to it, as if to say "That's right, I am verifying no data for you, let me clog up the screen some more".

Maybe it is because I am in the consumer marketing department, and our company is VERY specific on how our brand is displayed, our digital platforms are configured, our customer experience flows are managed, our corporate iconography, etc. These dashboards that I have stand out like a sore thumb from a design perspective, and are visually jarring. It is bad enough that these widgets have to snap to some strange grid that Smartsheet has, so I cannot use our branding mandated spacing and alignments for internal communications, but now I have to deal with large swaths of what amounts to dead space showing no information at times.

Sorry, just venting. We have a lot of data we would like to present, but are just finding a lot of limitations on how we can present it.