Dashboards and Minor Analyses

Caitlin Hall

Hi there -

I would like a summary sheet to describe the work captured in one of my smartsheets. I think it ought to be a dashboard, but I am having trouble finding the right solution -- I THINK this is because I probably need to do an intermediate step.

I would like to have a summary sheet that pulls info from a Smartsheet and does minor analyses. E.g.,

• Count of request by department (the department is a dropdown list. When I tried to "chart it", I got an error message, but what I would really like is a pie chart of which department the requests are coming from)
• Count of request type (another dropdown)
• Time between Request Added to Request Approved
• Etc.

I was hoping that the dashboard widgets would allow me to select a set of data and tell it how i wanted to count or compare things, but it seems like I probably need to do the counts and comparisons somewhere else. Do you have any suggestions for the most efficient way to get to this kind of basic data analysis and visualization?

Kimberly Loveless

I usually create a data sheet with cross sheet formulas to do the calculations and then use that sheet to do the charts. you could also use the sheet summary area to do these calculations.

for the count of requests by departments you would use something like

=COUNTIF({Department},"Dept")

Where Department is the column in your original sheet and Dept is the dropdown value, it would be similar for the request type

I find that adding a duration column can help with the time between when the request is added and approved and then you could average that for a dashboard as well.