Managing Smartsheet templates and workspaces after 3 years

Vivien Chong

As one of the key user that build solutions in my team, I realised I have built many templates and created many workspaces for my teams. I have lost track of the automations that has been built into each template or sheet: who is it notifying, what automation is involved.

When there are changes in staff portfolio or when a staff resign, I do not know what automation is directed to them and where are the automation located.

Do you experience the same? How do you manage these?

Do you have any best practice to share?

David Tutwiler

I can't claim this as my own idea because I saw this from another Smartsheet user in a webinar and started implementing it.

Now that Smartsheet offers Sheet level comments, we store this type of information as a comment on the Sheet itself. This has been helpful in describing column formulas and what information they are grabbing, explaining automation on the sheet, and listing who is being notified when. That historical data is great when we have to come back and make modifications.

On a larger scale, we do have interaction flow charts for a lot of our processes. These help us know how sheets are interacting with each other and plan for changes. We use diagrams.net as it is free, but Smartsheet has integrations with Lucid chart (I believe). Either would be good options.

David Tutwiler

I can't claim this as my own idea because I saw this from another Smartsheet user in a webinar and started implementing it.

Now that Smartsheet offers Sheet level comments, we store this type of information as a comment on the Sheet itself. This has been helpful in describing column formulas and what information they are grabbing, explaining automation on the sheet, and listing who is being notified when. That historical data is great when we have to come back and make modifications.

On a larger scale, we do have interaction flow charts for a lot of our processes. These help us know how sheets are interacting with each other and plan for changes. We use diagrams.net as it is free, but Smartsheet has integrations with Lucid chart (I believe). Either would be good options.