Linking Project checklist data selectively to reports?

OlliR

Hi,

I'm new to SmartSheet, but learning the ropes little by little. I have a Project checklist sheet, with all kinds of project related data you can imagine. The challenge is that I need to find a way to share, or more specifically, link parts of the sheet data to 2 other sheets (or reports?): one for my superior and one for the customer. As you already guessed, some information is public and some not, so I need to be able to cherry pick the sheet data for each of the two documents. It would be the easiest way to just share the same checklist to customer with restricted visibility, but unfortunately it's not possible to restrict the access on a cell level other than hiding (and then locking) a column.

I've been reading all kinds of tutorials regarding reports/linking sheets etc, but what would be the best/robust way to achieve something like I just described?

Also, how could I make the replication of the aforementioned documents as easy as possible when the next project starts? Is it possible to make a project check list template with (partially) locked content and with some kind of automation in Smartsheet to create a (custom template based) sheet/report for the superior and customer out of it?

Andrée Starå

Hi @OlliR

I hope you're well and safe!

What kind of document is it?

I'm asking because sometimes I recreate client's documents in Smartsheet so they can be connected and tied together.

Would that work?

I hope that helps!

Be safe and have a fantastic weekend!

Best,

Andrée Starå | Workflow Consultant / CEO @ WORK BOLD

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OlliR

Thank you for the reply Andrée 👍I try to describe my challenge in a more detailed way:

I have a project checklist with ca. a hundred rows. Information is status dropdowns, names, numbers (run rates) basic stuff. This checklist will be the basis for all projects in the future. The information on the checklist is needed to be communicated to my superior and also for the customer - of course selectively. There are some cells that we'd not want to share to the customers.

As it's not possible to use tabs in SmartSheet, it forces us to have one sheet per project. As there will be tens of projects running simultaneously and new ones starting all the time, new copies of the checklist are generated all the time. So, there are tens of those checklists at any given time. This leads to the situation where gathering the information of all the on-going projects to one sheet is very difficult since the source sheets filenames cannot be locked/known beforehand. If there would be tabs, this would be really simple, since we'd be ok with just one sheet (1project per tab) and there would be just one filename. It would be really easy to have predefined cells from which the info would be then gathered to the overall tab and customer tab also. If something like this is indeed possible, please let me know :)

So, one challenge is the overall sheet displaying the selected info for the superior (without the need to manually add links to the project specific sheets) and the other is the way to restrict the information to the customer(s).

I found there's a possibility to build a report template, but this still would mean every time a new project is started, the link must be added the the report.