Welcome to the Smartsheet Forum Archives


The posts in this forum are no longer monitored for accuracy and their content may no longer be current. If there's a discussion here that interests you and you'd like to find (or create) a more current version, please Visit the Current Forums.

Formatting Reports

Kim Cunningham
edited 12/09/19 in Archived 2016 Posts

Today I built my first report, and I am bummed out because there was no option to format it. Because each cell's data contains the formatting (especially colors and shading) from its respective source sheet, the final look of the report ends up looking like a crazy mosaic. My only solution was to eliminate formatting in the source sheets in order to create a nice looking report. Does anyone have any suggestions for this issue? 

 

Comments

  • I would be curious to see the SS response to this question.  Have you tried using the Sights dashboard as well yet?

  • Si Spence
    Si Spence ✭✭✭✭✭✭

    I'm just about to start a trial of Sights....that'll be another week of evenings gone!

  • It's really easy to setup and my team uses it as an executive summary for every project now..love it!

  • Kenyon Bajus
    Kenyon Bajus ✭✭✭✭

    Where is SmartSheet's reply on this?

    There is no reason we shouldn't be allowed to format reports. I need smaller fonts, etc... especially when formatting reports for Sights.

  • Oh good, I'm not crazy. I was looking everywhere for a way to format my reports for easy Dashboard viewing. Definitely a feature that is needed to make Dashboards truly dynamic.

  • +1 for this. We have color formatting in our source sheets that does not make sense when we pull in specific rows into reports.  The ability to format reports would allow us to use them for leadership reporting without making a separate copy of the sheets.

  • Adding my vote for this.  Following.

     

  • +1 for this. Reports are so messy when carrying format across. Wanted to increase the font on the report as I was going to present it and had to go to all the underlying sheets and do it for all. - Very frustrating

  • Are there any functions that I'm not aware of to do this? I see it can be scaled to print, but not to overall format. 

    Help!!!!

  • jw_pm
    jw_pm ✭✭✭

    +1 for this. I am bringing together 8 departments worth of status sheets, all with their own formatting, and the report is a visual mess. 

  • Would also love to see more robust report formatting.  E.g., we have project plans that we can create reports that become agendas for our clients (say a Kickoff Meeting) and report formatting (subtask indentation being maintained, color, font, etc.) would be super useful.  

  • Me too, I want to add my vote for more formatting options on the reports.

    But I believe what I need is fairly basic. I just want to make the reports "prettier" and easier to read:

    1- Be able to add a title or some type of introduction at the top of the report

    2- Add separator lines/rows to make the printed report easier to read. (In one of my reports, I merge two SmartSheets and I would like to have a visual separator)

    3- Be able to highlight some cells by changing the background color.

    Thanks!

  • As far as I can tell, I can't do this natively in Smartsheet (but I can do it in Access or Crystal Reports). I'd like to have a report in a format like this:

    Dept 1

    Project 1A: Name / Description / Status / Target / Etc.

    Completed

    • Task 1 / Assigned To / Date
    • Task 2 / Assigned To / Date

    In Progress

    • Task 3 / Assigned To / Date
    • Task 4 / Assigned To / Date

    Next Steps

    • Task 5 / Assigned To / Date
    • Task 6 / Assigned To / Date

    [Repeat as needed for each Dept and Project]

This discussion has been closed.