Using or not using hierarchies

For sales I have been advised not to use heirarchies to group things by areas like likelihood, potential size, stage of progress, etc, because once they're a few pages long it's a bit unweildy. I was advised to use no hierarchies for a sales pipeline and instead rely on Reports for all of that.

But I see that with the templates that are offered, the one for Sales by Probability does just that -- it uses hierarchies to group rows by probability.

I'd sure appreciate some thoughts on pros and cons of using hierarchies in these ways.

Thanks!

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Comments

JohnHinkle

It would really depend on how you want to navigate through your sheets and how you want them set up. I like using hierarchies because it makes my sheets neater and more organized. All my tasks are grouped into smaller logical groupings and I can expand or collapse parent rows based on what I want to see and work on. I also have a lot of formulas in my sheets, and the CHILDREN() function makes building them easy.

I would suggest trying them out! You could make a copy of your sheet and set up hierarchies and see if you like them or not.

SmartJason

Thanks. I suppose the given application makes all the difference. Where I'm looking at customizing variations on the Sales Pipleline templates, where I will have a lot of one-line contacts quickly taking up many pages and will need to have the system "sort" or "filter" them for me by criteria so I know who to contact when, in that case it seems using no hierarchies and relying mainly on Reports is the way to go.

Would you agree?

Which is what I was advised to do by two people at SmartSheet, and which is sort of inconsistent with their template for Sales Pipeline by Probability since, as I mentioned, changing probabuility status by moving them back and forth between parent groups is probably not so convenient when there's pages and pages of rows in each group and when the probability status will conceivably need to be changed a majority of the times each contact is updated.

Unless a formula can move a row to a different parent group automatically when the cell contents for probability is changed by the user. I don't think that's possible, is it?