We found a template for multiple projects that uses a standard folder setup to keep Reports, Project Plan and Dashboards for each project within its own project folder... allowing us to have the separate lists of tasks and RFI's, rollups organized for each project rather than a forever-growing list of entries from old projects that don't matter.
The limitation that Smartsheet seems to have is no ability to use formulas to dynamically specify a range. For example, if I have an "RFILog" in each project folder with a "critical" column, I would like to have some kind of rollup formula that looks at each Project folder (a dynamically built string based on the Project Name in each row in my main project intake table if the project status is ACTIVE?), opens each "RFILog" chart and does a simple count of critical path RFI's. Then roll that up into a single "RFI Status" column in the intake table that can be reflected in my main dashboard as "THIS Project Manager needs to go talk to THIS client! Project is falling behind!")
I seem to be able to do this somewhat manually by adding each "RFILog" sheet into a Report SHEET FILTER, but that's going to get out of hand after a couple dozen projects. We are an Engineering firm doing 5-10 small, highly similar projects a month, not 5-10 big projects a year. I just left Monday.com because it also can't handle multi-project management - just glorified task lists and one-project-at-a-time management. Smartsheet has taken it multiple steps farther and I really hope this is able to be our final solution.
Is there a way anybody knows of to traverse the project folders more dynamically? A native formula, a great data add-on, or some suggestions to reorganize my project structure to get a little more dynamic capability out of a folder-based structure? Seems like this is not really "the SmartSheet Way" or maybe it needs to be accompanied by a separate API service that can go beyond what built-in Cell Formulas can do.
