Widgets forget chart type and columns included when data source is changed.

Scott Saxton

I have a dashboard with several widgets that are fed by one smartsheet. I update the smartsheet every friday with that week's collected info. I then go into the dashboard and change the data source for the widgets to include the new line with the new weeks info and usually to maintain a 4 or 5 week rolling selection of lines. When I changed the data source, more often than not, the chart type reverts from column to line and the columns included reverts to all columns. I'm not sure why it forgets these settings. The column and row selection in the data source is kept to the same columns, just different rows.

Genevieve P.

Hi @Scott Saxton

How are you recording the date for each row in your source sheet?

If the column is set up to be a Date Type of column, then you can use this in a Report filter to either specify a date range with "Is Between" or "Is in the last X days":

You will need to select the Date column as part of the filter before these options appear. If you don't see this as an option, it would be helpful to see a screen capture of your source sheet, but please block out any sensitive data.

Cheers,

Genevieve

Genevieve P.

Hi @Scott Saxton

Instead of needing to update the source for the chart each week, what about creating a Report that looks at your sheet data and pulls the appropriate columns/rows? Charts can either look at a specific, manually selected range in a Sheet, or they pull the entire data from a Report (see: Using Chart Widgets)

Then you can have your Chart widgets looking at that one Report (never needing to change the source), which will keep the formatting the same.

As you update the Report with new rows, these will automatically appear in your Chart. Depending on how your sheet is set up, you could potentially even create a filter for the Report to automatically include the new rows instead of manually changing what it's looking for.

Let me know if you'd like to see screen captures of how to set this up and I'm happy to clarify further.

Cheers,

Genevieve

Scott Saxton

Genevieve,

Thank you for your answer and I believe I understand your point. Yes, pointing the widget to a report seems like a great idea but the issue I run into is that I need to only show the last 6 or so rows otherwise the graph widget becomes too cluttered and unreadable. I looked into reports and I understand how to create one but the filter criteria does not seem to allow date ranges or "last x days" or anything like that.

Genevieve P.

Hi @Scott Saxton

How are you recording the date for each row in your source sheet?

If the column is set up to be a Date Type of column, then you can use this in a Report filter to either specify a date range with "Is Between" or "Is in the last X days":

You will need to select the Date column as part of the filter before these options appear. If you don't see this as an option, it would be helpful to see a screen capture of your source sheet, but please block out any sensitive data.

Cheers,

Genevieve

Scott Saxton

I see! Yes, my date column was set as text AND primary. I had to create a second date column and make sure it was set as date and not text. Now I can filter it as I need. Thank you!

Genevieve P.

No problem! 🙂