Reports output

It might be possible to try a document transformation of some kind.

Yes, I agree they need to spice up reports.  I would like to see the ability to customize the output much more, be able to do calculations on the report, etc.  The reports are not truly reports, they are only queries of the tables.  

Hey Diana! As you have seen, you can currently export reports to Excel and PDF. Is there a specific format you are looking to export to?  If you want more control over editing and adding additional information to a report (such as columns and formulas) you could export the report to Excel, then import it back into Smartsheet which would create a new sheet with that data.

Hi Diana

While there is no work around within SS at this time, have you thought about setting your template up and then just doing a formula within excel on the template that mirrors another tab?

Then, granted your exports from SS to excel are of the same structure every time (ie same number of columns and in the same order), all you would have to do is export it and then copy all the data from the output file to the 'reference' tab. Just make sure your master document has enough rows, and it should copy across all the data you want. If you wanted to clean the file up prior to sending out to clients, you could copy the data in the master, that are formulas referencing that other tab, as 'paste as values' over the top of the formulas.

Another option could be to copy the data from the output file, and paste in to your master template using the paste function 'match formatting' or 'without formatting' (I'm at home on my mobile so can't doible check that). That is assuming the output is the exact same structure as the master, but just presented poorly. you could always easily change the structure up in the output to suit the master, then copy and paste, but again that is just meaning more work every time. Depending on the frequency in which youre doing this, it may be worth setting up the master with a 'reference' tab. You could also store all your previous export reference tabs in the same file by simply changing the name of the old one to have a prefix of the date it was superseded for example. That's how I work my exports (not from SS but other programs/tools where I am doing bulk exports).

Anyway... I hope that made some sense to you, please let me know if there are any questions with any of the above. Good luck!

I agree on the exporting. I have to export on a frequent basis. It is never usable format when I send into excel as far as presentation. I have a report tha thas twenty columns in it. It is a process to get the task done. On the PDF scheduler you can have options to adjust what is sent and how. That same option would solve alot of issues with the excel format. 

I currently use the scheduler in PDF to do our client updates. It works great. 

I've tried a few times to get more presentable reports out of Smartsheet by putting special rows in sheets with various font sizes and colors and using the report builder to extract just the data I wanted to display along with those special rows. It works Ok as long as you can live without calculations and a basic spreadsheet-like presentation is fine. These days I mostly use reports to generate the data I need, export it to Excel and paste it into an Excel worksheet. From there I end up using Excel's pivot tables to extract the data of interest, perform calculations and generate charts for formal presentations. Fortunately I don't have to do it daily or weekly so it's not that bad. Being able to add calculations to a report would be a big help but getting nice formatting and beautiful charts is quite a jump from where Smartsheet is today.

a trick we found for getting readable PDFs from either a sheet or a report is to increase the font size of the main sheet on the standard 10 say a 16 or 18 Font. Not sure that answer your question, but does work.