Sheet Roll-Up

Unfortunately, cell linking is a horrendous overly-administratively burdensome mechanism that requires a lot of manual configuration and set up and maintenance.

Competitor products offer sheet roll up functionality that automatically creates a "master" sheet with the various sub-sheets amalgamated or aggregated within it. This is a real producitivy saver that is invaluable to senior PMs or programme managers.

Smartsheet falls way short of the mark on this functionality.

Hi Sarah,

I agree with Heidi that it sounds like reporting will best serve your needs. Here are some ideas and resources for setting up your reports.

One common pattern for rolling up key sheet information into a report is to add a checkbox column named "Report" to the team members' sheets, and build a report that shows rows where "Report" = checked. Then each team member can check only the rows that they want to appear in the roll up report, while keeping the details confined to their own sheets.

You can also create reports that show management a particular dynamic view of work across the team, e.g., status = At risk, overdue tasks, etc. This support article has more details on how to create a report. Creating a report is often better than using cell links, because reports show dynamic views of multiple sheets and are easier to update in one place.

If you currently use hierarchy and roll-up calculations in sheets, e.g. formulas like =SUM(CHILDREN()), you can build a report that automatically pulls in parent rows only by adding a column to your sheets called "Parent level," where each cell has the formula =COUNT(ANCESTORS()). This formula automatically calculates the hierarchy level of each row, which you can use in a report filter.

Once you've had a chance to try out reports, you may also take a look at Sights (a paid add-on feature), which allows you to create a visual dashboard with key information from sheets and reports, annotations, images, and navigation to drill in.

Best regards,

Daniel

Product Manager, Smartsheet

Hello all,

Reports is a mechanism to aggregate data, agreed.

However, the massive functionality gaps make this unusable for us.

the main thing being that you lose all grouping an the ability to expand / collapse.

Also the fact that the filtering functionality is more or less removed (yes you can then go into the report builder - if you have permission - and edit the report parameters, but this is more limited than normal sheet functionality and is much more laborious.

It shouldn't be so difficult and involve such manual fiddling to make the system perform the most basic of project management functionality. Extra columns, extra valies etc....

Smartsheet need to up the game with reports and make them work like normal sheets or similar, before we could use them in any meaningful way as a roll up option.

Thanks.

Neat process Tim. I'm going to borrow that.

Craig

Ally, has anyone made suggestions here? If your report references a workspace or folder instead of specific reports, any sheet in that workspace/folder will automagically show up on a report. 

I too have tried using a folder in the "where?" condition for a report and it DOES NOT automatically incorporate new sheets added to that folder. That means a lot of manual hooking up every time a new project sheet is created...

I have it working for my projects .... However the sheets must be located in a workspace folder and not within a folder folder. If the sheets are in a workspace by clicking on the workspace all sheets within that folder become part of the Report. As new sheets are created in that workspace they will show up on the report. The only problem with the report process is you cannot use functions once the report is active to sum up values such a project amounts or resources. Very limited once the data is in the report. A master sheet with child sheets would be more beneficial so the functions become usable within the master sheet for summarization since the report cannot do summarizing.