Dashboard Improvement general post: for specific features find the related idea instead
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Paulo Ferrer
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Modestly, I create beautiful dashboards and the team likes it. It helped a lot to spread Smartsheet within our company. But it is still very limited in terms of design possibilities. The visual aspect is very important for engagement and there is no way to compare it with other dashboard apps that we have on the market, much more visually interesting. Someone always asks me to make a dashboard like the one he already has in Power BI, for example. It's frustrating for the user when I reply that there's no way, in Smartsheet. I'm a huge fan of Smartsheet and I'm sure this would drive general acceptance. It is necessary to allow figures for drawings; create frames on elements; configure the background with more than white or gray (but including images); overlay elements and create extra effects; more types of graphics; gauges; and other frame types for metrics.
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I would like to emphasize this post strongly!! I am personally in love with the information I can pack onto a dsahboard, but it's hard to encourage adoption with the minimal aesthetic options available because so many people associate branded colors, drop shadows, and glitzy fonts with "newer/smarter/better" dashboards.
Carly Chaput, PMP (she/her)
Project Manager | Program Management
www.linkedin.com/in/carly-chaput
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Totally agree - we need better dashboard widgets, features, etc
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Agreed! The importance of design elements for adoptability & visual communication cannot be dismissed, but many essential features of Dashboards are lacking. Dynamic date ranges, automated publishing (as in Sheets), built-in analysis, interactive/easily editable text widgets, etc. The list is long. I am currently facing a project where we would like to use Smartsheet, but other available tools' dashboards are so much more engaging that we may shift our underlying database for that end-user convenience.
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Completely agree - some focus on modern graph and widget styling would be terrific,.
I like using gauges on my dashboards, but currently putting it together is a bit hacky and tricky, something simple like a fuel-gauge style gauge that we can configure with ranges and colours so we only need to feed in a single report, rather than a modified pie chart that we need to calculate in a helper sheet.
Some calendar widgets would also be a fantastic addition to more easily display project gate clearances and due dates.
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I'm 100% here for dashboard improvements. Apologies if these are known issues, or, have simple work arounds I've missed. I welcome any feedback or tips!
My short wish list includes:
- Automatic scaling of value labels to fit the chart widget window-Make your chart small, and value labels stack on top of each other making them unreadable. Make your chart larger and value labels get clipped. This is particularly problematic for horizontal bar charts and stacked bars. (see top blue line in image below-value is clipped, other numbers overlap other data columns)
- Ability to suppress "zero value" for value labels in a chart. If there is not data, I don't want a zero value label on the chart. There will be data in those categories at some point, so I don't want to eliminate/suppress them from my sheet or corresponding report that feeds the chart.
- The ability to edit series labels. I import data using shuttles from a variety of sources into smartsheet. Some of that data within cells use abbreviations known only to the gods. I don't want to keep making "helper columns' with long "if" statements in my sheets to rename things. It makes my sheets bloated and difficult to find a particular column. Please, just let me edit the series label.....please.....
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Glad this is on the 2023 roadmap. I would also like to see:
The ability to web link (embed) a smartsheet dashboard within a dashboard, without showing the header bar. This could enable changes on the original dashboard to flow through without extra work.
The ability to carry over brand colors, and have a custom color set that will always populate when you create a dashboard. I spend a lot of time copy/pasting hex#
+1 on the ability to overlay tiles, or not have the required 1 box spacing between widgets.
Non rectangular widget options
Slicers to add to charts, to filter data in the charts
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I agree strongly as well. My company has standardized letterheads and pdf templates that I would like to set as backgrounds on dashboards and reports.
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This is probably one of the most important features needed to be worked on. We use Smartsheet to store a lot information, and having better visualization would go a long way into selling this product more for my organization to use. Hard to sell visualization with Smartsheet when we don't even have a combo/dual axis chart as an option. very limiting and constricting.
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I'm 110% in support of this post. I love the power of the dashboard, and see it as one of the most powerful tools to improve our operation.
It's "Measuring what Matters" on display, live.
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Hi all,
A number of Dashboard enhancements have been released!
- Custom background colors for dashboards
- Custom background colors for widgets
- Image widget display settings
- Expanded font library
Check out the Announcement Post here.
Please continue to provide your feedback on Dashboards and other Smartsheet features here in the Product Idea area. It's most helpful when we have votes on specific requests (such as this other idea specific to Dashboard Backgrounds) so we can update individual statuses as needed.
For example, here are some other threads that relate to some of the discussions here:
- Chart Labels: drag labels overlap & stacked column labels
- Editable Font Size and Colour for Data Labels on Charts
- Shortcut to Dashboard Header / Bookmarks
Cheers,
Genevieve
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Hi. We have a solution called Smarter Dashboards that can create dynamic views with multiple filters using your Smartsheet data. Different users will see only the data relevant to them, which you can control through an admin sheet. See the demo here:
Drop me a line at j.harris@smarterbusinessprocesses.com if you'd like to have a chat about it.
Thanks, James
CTO, Smarter Business Processes
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So many industries and projects can benefit themselves from Dashboards, which are no longer just a visual of reporting but actually summarize and engage their stakeholders with relevant and live information with an integral overview and result-driven focus.
Catalina Giraldo
PM /BA
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Also , we should be able to choose a Landscape orientation instead of just Portrait.
Also we should be able to do a chart for the sheets summary and not be obligated to create a report - its just so frustrating
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Any time spent correcting the report widget sizing is too much time spent. All of our project managers have to constantly (meaning daily) change the size of report widgets to match the reportable content. Before all meetings where any dashboard will be viewed, someone has to take the time to go make sure it's fixed before those meetings begin. When users are scrolling adverse within the widget, we should have an auto sizing option.
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Hi all,
More Dashboard updates have been released! Here's the announcement on our newest Dashboard enhancements.
I've edited the title of this post to clarify that if you have a specific idea relating to Dashboards please find that related idea instead (or create a new idea with that request if it doesn't exist).
We're tracking generic feedback on this post but it's best if the ideas are posted individually so we can update separate statuses.
If you don't see a previous note you had on this thread, I moved some of the comments on to existing Idea posts that had a more accurate title.
Here are examples of individual ideas that currently exist in other threads:
- Chart Labels: drag labels overlap & stacked column labels
- Editable Font Size and Colour for Data Labels on Charts
- Shortcut to Dashboard Header / Bookmarks
- Mixed Type Charts: bar + line
- Widgets in Dashboard: Aspect Ratio
- Create groups of widgets on dashboards
- Email Links in Dashboard (mailto)
- Table of Content in Dashboard
- Dashboard Improvement - ability to draw
Cheers,
Genevieve
