Learn how to leverage Smartsheet dashboards and reporting to create clean, real-time insights across your projects.
Smartsheet Dashboards are interactive, visual hubs that display live data from your sheets and reports. They give you a real-time, bird’s-eye view of your work for quick insights and decision-making. A dashboard is composed of widgets (charts, metrics, reports, images, etc.) that you arrange on a canvas to highlight key information.
Smartsheet Reports are dynamic, filtered views of your data that can consolidate rows from multiple sheets into one place. Use reports to pull specific information (e.g. all “In Progress” tasks across projects) or to create summary tables with grouping and calculations. Reports are essentially live queries on your sheets – any change in the underlying sheets instantly reflects in the report.
Metrics Sheets (or Sheet Summary fields) are where you perform calculations to feed your dashboard. Since a dashboard itself can’t do calculations, you use sheet formulas or summary fields to compute totals, averages, counts, etc. A metrics sheet is simply a regular sheet dedicated to storing these formula results (often via cross-sheet references), which dashboard Metric widgets then display.
In a nutshell: Set up your sheets with the needed formulas (or create reports) first – then build the dashboard to display those results. Dashboards pull from existing sheet data and report results; they do not store data themselves.
Creating a Smartsheet dashboard is straightforward. Dashboards allow you to showcase metrics, charts, project status, and other info in one visual canvas. Common use cases include project status dashboards for stakeholders, team productivity dashboards, or executive overview portals. Follow these steps to create a new dashboard and populate it with data:
In Smartsheet, click the + Create button (usually on the Home or Browse tab) and select Dashboard/Portal. Give your dashboard a name that reflects its purpose (e.g. “Project Alpha Status Dashboard”). An empty dashboard will open in edit mode.
Decide what information and visuals you need. Smartsheet offers various widget types, including:
Using the dashboard editor’s toolbar (usually on the right side), start adding widgets one by one. For each widget:
As you add each widget, link it to the correct source data (sheet, report, or URL). At first, focus on getting the widgets pulling the right data; don’t worry about perfect layout yet. You’ll see live data populate as you configure each widget.
After adding the necessary widgets and verifying they show the correct data, arrange them into a clear layout. Drag and resize widgets to group related information and make the dashboard easy to scan. Smartsheet dashboards can be up to six widgets wide but infinitely long, so you have flexibility in design. Common practices include placing big KPIs (metrics) at the top, charts and reports in the middle, and supplemental links or notes at the bottom. Apply formatting options as needed: you can set background colors, widget title styles, and widget interactions (e.g., clicking a chart can open the source sheet). As a quick tip, don’t spend too much time on “prettiness” until your data is correctly connected. Get the content right, then polish the appearance.
Once your dashboard is built and saved, you can share it with stakeholders. Use the Sharing button (usually bottom or top right) to add people or groups. Assign Viewer access for those who should only view, or Admin access for those who can edit the dashboard layout/content. Viewers do not need access to the underlying sheets or reports to see the dashboard’s content – this means you can safely share a high-level dashboard with executives without exposing all the detailed sheets. You can also publish the dashboard to a read-only URL if you want to share it broadly without requiring login (ensure no sensitive data if you choose to publish).
When creating your first dashboard, watch out for these pitfalls:
Need a jump-start on building a professional dashboard? Talk to Skyway – we can design a Smartsheet dashboard that aligns with your real-world operations, ensuring your data is presented clearly and accurately for your team.
Talk to SkywayA huge benefit of Smartsheet is real-time updates – your dashboard metrics should automatically refresh whenever new data comes in. To achieve this, you must set up your metrics with the right formulas and references. This section explains how to configure metrics so they include new rows (or new data categories) without manual intervention. We’ll also cover techniques to avoid common pitfalls like having to update formulas for every change.
If your metric is a calculation (count, sum, average, etc.), make sure the formula in your sheet covers
all current and future rows. In Smartsheet formulas, you can reference entire columns by using the
column name twice (e.g., Status:Status or Amount:Amount). For example, to
count tasks marked "Complete" in a Task sheet, use:
=COUNTIFS(Status:Status, "Complete")
This formula will count every row in the Status column that has "Complete", including any new rows added later. By contrast, a formula that only references a specific range (e.g., Status1:Status50) would ignore rows added beyond row 50, causing your dashboard metric to become outdated when new data comes in. Always use full column references or sufficiently large ranges to encompass growth.
A best practice is to perform your key metric calculations in Sheet Summary fields
(found in the sheet’s Summary tab). Sheet summary formulas work just like normal ones but are not tied
to grid rows, so they won’t be affected by rows being inserted, deleted, or moved. For instance, create
a sheet summary field named "Total Open Tasks" with the formula
=COUNTIFS(Status:Status, "Open"). This field will update automatically as new tasks are
added or status changes. On your dashboard, point a Metric widget to this summary field. Because the
summary field always exists in the sheet, you avoid cell reference breakage.
Sometimes the challenge is not just new rows, but new categories of data. For example, imagine a “Status” column with values like “Not Started, In Progress, Complete.” If a new status value (say “On Hold”) gets introduced via a new row, how do you get a metric for it without editing formulas?
One approach is to use Smartsheet Reports with grouping. Create a Report on the sheet, include the Status column and maybe an ID or count column, and enable grouping by Status with a count summary. The report will automatically list each unique Status and how many tasks have it – if a new status appears in the sheet, the grouped report will dynamically add a new group and count it. You can then embed this report in a dashboard (as a table or chart) to display counts by status.
Note: Smartsheet now supports using a report’s grouped summary data directly in a Chart widget. So you could, for instance, chart the report above to get a bar for each status, including new ones, automatically.
When using full column references, Smartsheet will count blank placeholder rows at the bottom of the
sheet. For example, =COUNTIF(Status:Status, "") might return 10 even if you only have 2
truly blank statuses, because Smartsheet always has 10 virtual empty rows ready for expansion. To avoid
confusion, you can adjust your formula to exclude those placeholders. A clean way is adding another
criteria that only counts blanks where another column is not blank:
=COUNTIFS(Status:Status, "", Task Name:Task Name, <> "")
This would count blank Status only for rows that have a value in “Task Name”.
After setting up a metric formula, do a quick test: add a sample row to your sheet (or have someone submit a form if that’s your process) and see if the sheet’s formula result updates accordingly. The dashboard metric widget should reflect the change almost instantly (if the dashboard is open, you might hit refresh to pull the latest values).
=SUM(Row1:Row50) is a bad idea if Row 51 might be
used next week.INDEX can help.Ensuring all your metrics update correctly can get tricky as your sheets and processes evolve. Not sure if your metrics are capturing everything? Book a Metrics Audit with our team.
Book AuditSmartsheet Reports let you gather and filter data from one or multiple sheets into a custom view. Think of reports as live, customizable queries: you define what rows query, and Smartsheet will continuously pull any data meeting those criteria. This is extremely useful for creating filtered lists (e.g., “All high-priority tasks across all projects”) or summary views (using grouping and summary to get totals).
Start a New Report via Create -> Report (choose Row Report). In the Report Builder:
Status is not Complete or End Date is in the next 30 days.
This is where reports become powerful analytic tools:
Smartsheet reports now allow you to chart these first-level group summaries directly in a Dashboard Chart Widget!
=IF(Checked@row=1, 1, 0) and Sum that helper.
Charts are a powerful way to visualize your Smartsheet data on a dashboard. You can create pie, bar, line charts, etc., to highlight trends and breakdowns. In Smartsheet, charts are created via the Chart Widget, using data from either a sheet or a report.
Charts need structured data—typically a summary table with categories and values. You have two main options:
COUNTIFS).
Ideally, format it as a simple table with no extra text around it.Edit your dashboard and select Add Widget -> Chart.
Building a portfolio dashboard means creating a high-level view that aggregates data from multiple projects. Instead of looking at one project at a time, a portfolio dashboard gives you insight across all projects in your program—tracking overall portfolio health, key milestones, and resource allocation.
To roll up data effectively, ensure consistency across your project sheets. Ideally, every project sheet should have:
By naming these fields identically across all sheets (e.g., always "Overall Status"), you ensure seamless aggregation.
There are two primary ways to aggregate this data:
Once you have your source data (likely a Sheet Summary Report), build your dashboard to tell the story:
Kick off your portfolio management with our Portfolio Template Pack. It includes pre-configured project sheets, metric roll-ups, and a ready-to-use dashboard.
Yes – Smartsheet dashboards display live data. The numbers and charts you see are pulled directly from sheets and reports and will automatically refresh as the underlying data changes. In practice, when someone updates a sheet (adds a new row, changes a status, etc.), any dashboard widget tied to that sheet or a report will reflect the change almost instantly.
Absolutely. You can share a dashboard by inviting users with Viewer permissions, and those viewers do not need access to the underlying sheets or reports in order to see the dashboard content (Metrics and Charts). One exception: if you use a Report Widget, viewers will need access to the source sheets for that specific widget.
Both are used to calculate metrics. Use Sheet Summary fields for metrics that belong to a single sheet (e.g., project status). Use a dedicated Metrics Sheet when you need to cross-reference multiple sheets or perform complex aggregations that don't fit on a single project sheet. Both keep calculations off the dashboard itself.
"Missing Source" means the widget can’t find the data it was tied to. This often happens if the source cell or field was deleted, moved, or renamed. To prevent this, use stable references like Sheet Summary fields rather than linking to specific grid rows that might change.