How to build a report that will count different criteria from a column?

Michael Richard

I have a dropdown multi-select column in my sheet. It can be seen below:

I want to be able to build a report in Smartsheet that will be able to tell me the count of each different category.

For example, a count of all the clients that selected American/Alaskan Native as their race. Or, all the clients that selected American Indian/Alaskan Native AND Asian as their race.

Any help would be awesome! Thank you!

Paul Newcome

Once you create your report, you would need to group it by that column and then use the Report Summary feature to display your counts.

Paul Newcome

Once you create your report, you would need to group it by that column and then use the Report Summary feature to display your counts.

Jeff Casto

Hi @Paul Newcome ,

I'm trying to do a similar thing. My projects all have phases selected from a dropdown list.

I'm trying to make a report that counts how many projects are in the aforementioned stages. This next screenshot is of the test report I'm making that shows 3 projects with three different stages. In this case, I would like my report to show that there is one project with the stage of Creative Dev and one project with the stage of Research and Strategy and one project with the stage of Production. I want to count those to eventually pull that report into a dashboard showing the total number of each phase per project.

I'd like to show the number of phase types on a dashboard similar to this example. Mine would show How many projects are in each phase. Rather than this one that shows how many tasks are in each status.

I read your advice to the original question and I have a couple slow bumps. When I go to the "Group" and "Summarize" drop downs, I do not have "Phase" as an option.

Any clues are much appreciated!

Paul Newcome

Make sure the Phase column is not set as a multi-select dropdown. When grouping by a dropdown column, it has to be a single select.

Jeff Casto

Oh, good to know! Thank you!

Jeff Casto

Oh, fudge. I spoke too soon. When I changed the drop down to not allow multi-select, the phases disappeared from my report! I went ahead and still "Grouped" them by phase to see if I could since it appeared as an option now, and it seems like they did group...invisibly. I still can't see phase as an option in "Summary" though.

This screenshot shows the disappearance of the Phases from the report and the non- drop down option in "Summary".

This screenshot shows I do have an entry in the Phase column in my project sheet from where the Report info is pulling.

Thanks again for the extra effort!

Genevieve P.

Hey @Jeff Casto

Changing a column from multi-select to single-select means that it changed to a "new column" - the Report doesn't recognize the update. It sees it like an entirely new column was added to your sheet, so you'll need to update your current column list in the Report to re-select the correct one again.

See: Select columns included in a report

Cheers!

Genevieve

Jeff Casto

Right on @Genevieve P. ! Thank you!

Paul Newcome

It also looks like you have a hidden column there to the left of your report. When grouping, the headers for the groups are moved to the far left column. If that column is hidden then you will not be able to see those headers.