Searching Multiple Pages in a Report

grant53396 · 07/23/18

Hi,

Not sure if anyone is sharing the same frustration as myself with some of the limitations of SmartSheet, but I hit the 25,000 references limit within a month of using the system, and was told to use a report instead by support. This sort of works okay, but then today, one of the team highlighted that as soon as you hit 500 entries, it puts it onto multiple pages, and you can only search for something on the page that you are currently looking at!!

So if I am currently on page 1 and want to search for a task that is on line 502, which is page 2, it will not find it, even in the global search bar at the top of the page! surely this is a broken tool, as what is the point of having the reports without this critical feature?? If we continue to use Smartsheet for what we are doing, by the end of a year, we typically have over 2,000 tasks, meaning everyone will have to flick through over 4 pages, searching for the same thing on each page until they find it!

Am i overlooking something, or is this a genuine issue?

Shaine Greenwood · 07/24/18

Hello—

The global search bar at the top of Smartsheet will locate contents as they exist on the source sheets themselves versus on a report, as reports are views of multiple sheets.

You might consider creating multiple reports based on a logical grouping (stage or type of task). If you're on a business or enterprise plan, you can roll up the high level tasks to a dashboard. More on dashboards here: https://help.smartsheet.com/articles/518547

From my experience in project and program management, if people have to constantly search for tasks by name to know more about them and take action, then the organizational method for these tasks needs to be revisited. Having to manually scan or search through over 2,000 tasks (whether they're all on one page and searchable or not) leads to delayed execution on projects.

You might also consider building more automation into your workflow so that people can collaborate through update/approval requests and other alerts instead of needing to scroll through a large report. Details on alerts and actions here: https://help.smartsheet.com/articles/2476191

grant53396 · 07/24/18

Thanks for the response Shaine.

Probably poor terminology on my part, but these aren't actually tasks, as we are using this to monitor the number of vehicles we hold onsite, which will always be a significant number.

This is proving to be a significant frustration for us, and seems crazily basic to not be able to do this. Individuals are not necessarily shared into the original data source for data privacy reasons, so that is why they cannot find this in the global search.

Looks like we will have to look for an alternative solution for this then on a shared excel sheet or google sheet, as it seems clear Smartsheet wont work for us on this application.

Searching Multiple Pages in a Report

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