Beginner's Guide to Smartsheet Features

Welcome to this Smartsheet tutorial for beginners. In this video, I'm going to be showing you exactly how you can get started with Smartsheet, begin leveraging all of its functionality, and how you can use it most effectively, even if you've never used it before. Specifically, these are the very things that I am going to be going through in this video, so that by the end, you are much more confident to use Smartsheet. So you're probably wondering who am I, what gives me the authority to produce this video. I just want to quickly mention who I am. My name is Jeremy. I'm a Prince2 practitioner. I'm a Smartsheet certified user, and I've been using Smartsheet in my corporate role for a leading global organization for over seven years with multi-million revenue generating projects. This is what's really important as well. I've gone through the full life cycle of adopting Smartsheet from the initial solution design. all the way through to implementation, training, solution optimization, and much more. So I am fully aware of all the intricate ins and outs of Smartsheet, its functionality on offer, and I've been kept abreast with all the developments as the platform has rolled out new features, functionality, etc. So what I'm now going to do is just walk you through this agenda. This has been chronologically put together so that you will go through using the tool. at a pace that kind of works for you as a new user. So firstly, sign up accounts and permissioning. I do just want to quickly touch upon this. I've opened up in another browser, smartsheet.com, the home interface. So this is what you will, you know, you'll navigate to smartsheet.com every time you want to access the platform. Now they do have a mobile application, which you may be using as well. The way Smartsheet works is it's a cloud application. So in other words, as I say, you access it via the internet. You need to log into your account, as will other team members, but the beauty of all of this is all of the data is stored in the cloud. And at the same time, team members, you know, as people are entering data into Sheets, as long as you're saving and refreshing, you will see their data, their inputs in real time. So this is essentially how you will sign up. Now, you can also get a free trial if you don't have one already to test the functionality out for 30 days, at least at time of recording. Now, in terms of pricing, you may be wondering about you know team members using your Smartsheet documents and everything that you create. I'll talk about this as the video goes on but do know that the way it typically works is you will get on a kind of a business plan where various users will be paying a fee to access the tool per month. Now you can have free collaborators and I will touch upon that later so not everyone may need a license. If you are confused about what plans get on it's probably best to reach out to Smartsheet support. So that's how you sign up. That's how you're going to log into Smartsheet every single time. That's exactly what I've done here. Now, you may notice that I'm on a free trial myself. I actually, as I say, use this in my organization every single day, but I need to keep my data protected. So I'm not sharing that with you. So I'm going to sign that off. Now, the other thing I want to quickly mention is that in terms of permissioning, the way Smartsheet works is you can kind of lock down resources or share them with other users. Again, I'll show you that later, but you can have some confidentiality in this platform. Okay, so onto the general navigation and interface. Now, as I've said, this is a web browser platform. And the beauty of that is that you can open up different tabs. So I've just shown you that as an example here, we've got the home interface as a separate tab. So you can, you know, you can have various different tabs of different sheets that you're working on, etc. So it's really, really useful for that. So I've now opened up the other tab, which shows us the home interface. So this is what you're likely to see if you just signed up to a free trial. Let me walk you through it. On the left hand side, this is the kind of main panel that you will be using to move around your Smartsheet account. So at the top, we've got home. The second one is notifications. So if anyone tags you in a comment or anything like that, this is where it's going to appear here, or maybe there's a request, an update request for you. This is where you're going to find it. If you need to search for a particular file, you can do that via here if you know the name of it. This button is absolutely huge. So this is where, if you can imagine on your desktop PC or laptop, laptop or Mac, where all your files are stored and how you can access them. That's essentially the browse functionality. So you're going to spend a lot of time here. Now I've created a workspace around this Smartsheet tutorial and I'll walk you through what a workspace is in a second. I just want to finish off the general interface. If you've opened up anything recently, it will appear in this little recents section. If you've favoured any item, which I can show you how to do that. Well, actually, as an example, let's just say I've favoured this one. then it will appear in this favorites panel. You can obviously remove that as well and it will disappear. You also have the ability to leverage work apps and integrations. You can do that here. We've got the ability to start a new project, program or process from this button. And also there's something called a launcher, but that's probably beyond your scope as a beginner. Now, if you need to access your account at any moment, you can do that via the bottom left. Now, this is really, really important because you may want to upgrade, you may want to change who can access what, kind of user management, group management, that can all be done by this interface. You can also change personal settings. So that's important if you wanted to change things like, you know, your job category or your profile picture, also kind of your settings as well. If you want auto save on or off, how you want to be communicated with, you know, your... registered mobile devices, just things like that. Personal settings are quite important. And there's also other things that you can do as well, like you can change your personal colors and your logo. So you can make your kind of Smartsheet account more branded to you. So it's really, really important. Okay. So that's all from the left-hand side. Now that's the kind of general navigation interface. So I'm going to click the checkbox here and I'm going to change that to complete. And the reason why I'm doing this, by the way, as well in this tutorial is I'm just showing you how this, this is the, this is a sheet. So. or a grid as it's known as in Smartsheet. This is the kind of core functionality of the tool, Smartsheet, if you like. And I'm just showing you this in action, how we can kind of leverage dropdowns, checkboxes, but I'll walk you through this as we go on. I just wanted to give you a bit of an insight of me kind of using it as I'm providing you this tutorial. Next, I want to show you how we can organize files, if you like. So in Smartsheet, there's something known as workspaces. So if you can imagine a workspace as a kind of high level place to store files. You then have folders. So this is a workspace. These are individual files. And what we could do is we could create a folder that kind of acts in between. Let's just call it project files. And we could pretty much store all of these in that folder if we wanted to. You left click and drag it up and you can do all of them at the same time if you wanted to as well. Left click and drag it into there if you wanted to do that. So you've got workspace, folders, and then you've got the resources. You don't have to use folders. but they can just be a good way of kind of keeping all of your data kept in suitable places. Okay, so that is now done. Sheets, reports, and dashboards. So let me quickly show you these. So this is a dashboard, this is a report, and this is a sheet. And these are the three different types of resources in Smartsheet to be most aware of. As I say, I've shown you thus far a sheet, so this is a sheet, and this gives you all of the functionality you would expect. If you've got any history of using Excel, then you'll have an idea of how this works. It's a spreadsheet functionality, and I'll be walking you through this as the video goes on. A report is a means of rolling up different data points from across your account, from various different sheets, whether that's individual sheets or a collection of sheets. Again, I'll be walking you through this shortly. And then dashboards are pretty much a means of showcasing... KPIs and project data, but again, I'm going to be doing a deep dive as this video goes on. I just wanted to let you know that we've got three different types of files that you will be creating and leveraging when you use Smartsheet. So this is now done. Templates and the Solution Center. The reason why I'm showing you this is you can create spreadsheets from scratch, you can create reports from scratch, and you can create blank dashboards from scratch. But one of the beauties of Smartsheet, and this is one of the things that have been kind of Over time, the tools got much better. As if created a series of templates. So I'm going to show you how you can access them now. To get up running much faster. It's also good to just test the functionality and how it all works. So to find the templates, you can either go into a new workspace, right click and click on browse templates. Alternatively, you can click on this here, this plus button. And these are all of the various templates available to us. So we've got a simple project plan, project schedule management. Project with work breakdown schedule, a project management office solution, and project tracking and roll-up. Again, we can also import from Excel, Google Sheets, Microsoft Projects if we wanted to, if data's held there. And we can also create different resources from here. Now, Gantt and Board and Timeline, they are all essentially part of the grid or spreadsheet view, and I'll show you that in a second. That's how you create them. Again, I'll show you that in a second. Okay, one thing I haven't said at this point, which I just want to quickly touch upon, and I'm going to go back to this to show you, is that workspaces can be shared with other individuals, and you do that via the top right. So anyone who's shared to that workspace will see it, but Sheets is your kind of personal hub. So something in there, nobody else will be able to see, okay? Just bear that in mind. It's locked down to you unless you share it further. So let's just say I wanted to create, I'm going to go browse templates. I want to... create you know, I want to create something from a template. So there's various different solution templates. These are the project management ones. But if you look at this scroll here, this dropdown, there's various different ones available. So if you're in education, whether you're in finance, human resources, IT marketing, whatever, there's different options for you. As an example, let me just click on finance. You're going to have like an annual business. Like these are all the templates that are available for you to use out of the box. Now you are going to need to edit them and refine them, but it just can give you an idea of what you can create. And also you could edit them. to meet your needs as well. Okay, so let's just say project management, just because I'm a project manager. Let's just go simple project plan. So I've chosen this template. Now it gives you a description of what it includes. You got instructional video if you wanted to, etc. What you could do at this point, let's say we want to use it, we like the look of it, we just press create from template. And what that's going to do, this is going to show, and we just need to wait for this to essentially be created. Now this is what's been created for us. and at this point we can invite other people to access it see it edit it etc now this section here this will be the email subject line this will be the message you want to send to them you want people to be notified about it otherwise they're not going to know about it you can also cc yourself and then you share and it will just be sent via email to them okay now this is essentially what i created from the template so we've got a dashboard we've got a project plan so this is the sheet the spreadsheet functionality and we've also got a report here So this is the three key different file types, as I've mentioned earlier in this video. OK, so I'm going to close this workspace panel. I want to go back to browse. Now, one thing you're going to need to do is refresh just so that we can see this new template set of templates available to us. There we go. Simple project plan. That's what I just created. OK, and so I just showed you. So that's the templates and the solution center. I would suggest exploring it and seeing what's available to you. I now want to walk you through sheets. Because this, as I say, is the core functionality of Smartsheet. It's the spreadsheet functionality. So I've got various different things I want to show you in that. Firstly, let me open one up. So let me open up the project plan I've created ahead of time. So you'll see here that, let me just show you actually. So you'll see here it's shown us the Gantt view. Now you can see various different views in Smartsheet via this drop down here. So as you can see, the Gantt is kind of put over the top. of our grid view. If I select grid view, it will remove the Gantt. At the same time, we can see a card view. So if you're kind of Kanban project management, this will make sense. And you can also, or a board, and you can also see a calendar as well. That's another thing that you can do. And the way this is all kind of pulled together is via the dates that, so I've gone back to the grid view, via the dates that are included in the sheet. So we've got a start date and an end date, and that's how. the Gantt has been put together and the calendar view. If we didn't have date columns, then they would not, you know, you couldn't see them. But let me just walk you through this now. So just like a normal spreadsheet, we've got columns here. So these have been created ahead of time. If you want to create a new column, you can go insert column left, insert column right. We can delete the column. So I right clicked here, by the way. We can add column descriptions. If we want people to have an idea of what that column is all about, we can put filters on, we can sort, we can lock the column if we wanted to, we can hide it. And there's a few other kind of customization options down here, which I'll show you in due course. Now, these are the rows. So these are the columns. These are the rows. The way this has been set up is with some indenting. So this functionality here. And that enables a parent-child relationship. So as an example, we've got toggles. So these were all created in each cell. And then we've just kind of used the indenting, as you'll see there, to enable that, you know, collapsed and things like that. So let me just undo that. I want to get back to where we were. There we go. Here we go. So as I say, there's some colour formatting in here as well, just to differentiate the different rows. You'll see there that there was a formula, but I'm going to walk you through formulas in a second. I'm actually going to come out of this because I think this is a little bit overwhelming if you're new to Smartsheet. I actually want to show you a brand new grid or sheet from scratch. So let's call this spreadsheet grid. sheet. Okay. All those terms I've been using interchangeably throughout this video. So this is a plain sheet. Let's just say we're creating it from scratch. The project plan you just saw was created along similar lines. So, you know, you just go in here, you type in the name you want the heading to be. Same again for the second column. Now, when it comes to the column types, we have various different column types that we can leverage. We've got text numbers, drop-down list, dates, duration, contact list, checkbox. We saw that. In my agenda, we're leveraging that. Symbols, auto numbers, created by, created date, modified by, modified date. Now some of these will be created by default. As an example, modified by, modified date. If you selected this as an example. If I put something in here, oh, let me change that. Actually, I'm going to change this to that. I'm going to put it in insert column here and I'm going to put modified, not modified, I'm going to put created date, press okay. Now, if I put something in here, you should see and save it. You should see that we've got a created date. So it's just a good way of kind of time stamping. And I just wanted to show you what was kind of possible with the editing column properties. But yeah, right click on here and that's how you kind of do all of that. Now in terms of of, there's some other functionality I want to show you on the rows. What have I got here? So I want to show you now formulas because that can be useful. So what we can, you know, there's various different formulas and functions available to you. If you Google smart sheet function list, then I'll do that now, actually. Smart sheet function list. Then you can access all of the different smart sheet functions. they are function is another word for formula it's just smart sheet terminology and they're very very similar to excel they are slightly different but the main ones are kind of in there so count if as an example um we've got vlookups things like that you can leverage all of this it's probably getting into the more kind of advanced stuff here and i know this is a video for beginners but we can use different formulas so let's just say we wanted to put a formula in here it all starts with equals so let me just say um let me just show you an example one two three four five equals sum open bracket and then I'm going to select that cell range close bracket and we've got 15. So I just wanted to show you formulas I'm not going to go into too much detail I do actually have a whole course on using formulas so yeah I don't want to go into much more detail than that but you can leverage formulas and that's how you essentially do it. So let me just put that that in there. In terms of formatting so if you want to format your sheet that's all available via the ribbon at the top here so we can do things like I'm just going to put this in for now we can do things like obviously bolding italics underline we can put kind of a background color on each cell we can change the text things like that we can change where the cell text is lined you know is it left center you know is it top align middle line that kind of thing we can wrap as well so let's just say this went on for too long we can wrap the text so that oh why is that not worked It hasn't worked there, let me try a new cell. But you can basically get it. So as you can see, that text is too long for the cell. But if you wrap, then you should be able to, it should drop on one line. But for some reason, it's not working. I don't know why it should be. But trust me when I say, if you press the wrap button, it will appear underneath and it'll make the row larger. The thing with Smartsheet is you can't expand a row like you can in, say, Excel. You can't drag this bit down. So wrapping is the way around that if you wanted to make a row. have a higher height if you like. Other things, you've got format painter and things like that. So let's just say I want to remove that. And I like the format of this cell. We can do that. We've got conditional formatting. So as an example, if certain things happen in your sheet, other things will happen automatically. So as an example, you just have to set up rules for that. So as an example, if primary column contains, you know, you just First thing you do is you select the column for the condition, then you select the criteria, and then if that's met, then you can apply the format. So let's just say, let me discard this. So let's just say, conditional formatting, if primary column says hello, apply bold green to the entire row, and then Cool. Let me refresh. That should be working. Again, not quite sure why that hasn't come through, but you get the idea. That's how you set that up. So you've got conditional formatting available to you. Let me see. What else have we got here? Let me just check this. If PromoCon, I'm not going to go into too much detail here. But that's how you essentially how you set that up. We've also got the ability to highlight changes. So basically, if someone was to come in and make some changes on your sheet, you can see them just by pressing this toggle on or off. You can change when the changes were made, the different background color, etc. You can put links into cell links to link between your resources. You can add images. You know, everything is available at the top. So I suggest that you come in here and check all of this out. You know, all of the functions you have available to you. You can turn things into, say, currencies. you get the idea of percentages, things like that. date format. So you've got loads of different options there. You can also, if I was just to do date, so I could turn this into a start date, and then we could have something like, you know, drop that into a date. You've got things like that. You can restrict it to dates only. So you have all of this customization available to you. So that is the core thing here. If you want to save your work and you don't have all to save on, you can either press the short key, control S, or press this. We can print the page if we wanted to as well. We can apply filters here. Now the way filters essentially work. is you give them a name and then you just kind of specify. So let's just say filter one. That's obviously not a great description, but you know, primary column, if primary column is one of hello, apply, you know, and then what you can essentially do is have the filter on filter off. That's how you basically select your filter. So you just create a series of filters and then you can apply them. So I'm going to delete that. I'm going to turn my highlight changes off. The other thing to be wary of is the right hand side on the sheet. screen or interface. You can have conversations on the sheet level. So you could say something like, I need some, sorry, this is on the row level. On the sheet level, you can say something like, hey, at Bob, please, can you check cell 10 or whatever? And then hit enter. If they're an account as part of your organization, they will receive a notification and they will see it in the notifications here. Okay. So that's one of the notifications that we've been kind of shown. Something we've done something on our account and that's where we've got an alert and you'll see there's a little one there due to that So you can have conversations on the sheet level So, you know if someone's open this they can see the conversation you can also add comments on the row level So as an example add comment we could say something like hello Please support this initiative hit go and then you'll see this little icon here And if someone clicks that you'll see that comment. So you've got conversations which are really really handy You've got attachments. You can add attachments to a sheet. You can set up proofs. There's a brand folder you can leverage. Update requests, I'm going to show you that in a second. You can publish this. You can see an activity log of all the changes on the sheet. So this is really, really good from an audit trial perspective. So you can see as an example that I've done certain things like just some of the changes that I've made throughout this video thus far. You can also see a summary. So what you can also do is you can create sheet summaries, which enable you to... Analyze information on the sheet so and kind of use these for reporting But I think that's beyond the scope of this video. So let's go back to this. I've shown you formulas. I've shown you formatting Collaboration features. I just want to I've shown you comments and conversations, but I just want to show you alerts and update requests So something that you can do in smart sheet is you can set up alert So if you press that little bell button, so you can do it on the row level What you or click on the automation? that's another way of doing it as well but if you click on this little icon here set a reminder you can send yourself or another team member a reminder on the date that you specify and say something like you know we need to review this task and then you could basically just set it say for saturday um the first the 31st and i'm going to get a notification on saturday for that row press that and then that icon indicates that the reminder has been saved if you wanted to turn it off then you can just go back in here, delete the reminder. You can edit the message and things like that. But that can be really good to make sure things are actioned, whether that's for yourself or team members. Now, the other thing I want to show you is that we can send update requests. So instead of a notification, we can basically create a new request here. You just send it to the individual that you need an update from. You can change the subject line and put a message. So it could be, please update my sheet, or please come in and tell me the latest status of this project, or whatever it needs to be. And they're going to get an email. And in that email, there'll be a link for them to open up the sheet and make the required changes. You can be CC'd. You can include all of the columns in that kind of screenshot that's going to be included in the email. And you can change when you deliver it, whether you want it to be now or you can schedule it as well. So really, really handy. So I thought I would show you that. So that is the collaboration features really to be mindful and aware of. The other thing I want to mention is forms. So forms enable us to essentially collect. data from an individual, whether they are using Smartsheet or an internal or external stakeholder, maybe they don't have access to Smartsheet, but this is a good way of getting kind of information. So let's just say this is a project. In a project request sheet, you could have something like, you know, you could have something like project name. We could have, you know, budget required ETC. And... you know, you can set up this form in various different ways. You can have different fields, you can have required fields, you can have fields hidden, you can, you know, set up some validation as well if you wanted to, you can change, you know, how big the cell looks, etc, how many lines, what the default value is, you know, things like that. You've got all of this customization options and you just run through the form. And once you're kind of happy with it, you hit save. And then if I click share form, we can get a link. Okay, it looks like I'm limited because I'm on a free trial, but you can get a link and they can basically open up this. You can send that link, you know, via an email, via your internal internet site, whatever. And whoever opens up that link can submit their information into this form. Okay. Now in terms of settings, you can change how it looks, whether it's, you know, vertical, side by side or plain. You've got some security options as well. So you can put a capture on it. You can change what happens when someone submits the form. So they get a confirmation message. Is the form reloaded? You can change the messages that they receive. You can have new submissions should appear on the bottom of the sheet or the top of the sheet. And then you can send emails of submissions as well. Now, when it says new submissions should appear on, I want to show you what I mean by that. If someone was to populate the sheet, it would go and automatically populate this sheet here. Okay? Because the way it works is... If you can, like the way, the form is integrated with the sheet and they kind of work in tangent. So if I refresh this, we should see that, or go on form, manage, no, what I'm actually going to do instead is just test, no, we called it project name, didn't we? Project name, project. budget if i then do this i'm actually going to save i'm actually going to delete that existing form by clicking on manage form i'm going to delete this so delete you can deactivate it as well if you didn't want to use it but let me create a new form you'll see that these are now in there by default it's copied it's copied it across from the columns that i created so one of the most effective ways to create a form is to simply build out all the fields that you want on that form maybe even the drop downs in the in this spreadsheet interface first and then click on forms, create form. Okay. Really, really useful to do that. So that's forms in a nutshell. Let me just quickly, I'm going to go back to this screen. So to get to this screen, it's forms, manage forms. I want to, no, I didn't want to do that. Sorry. I wanted to click on, no, that's, that's, I was going to try and open up the URL, what it looked like. If you were sending the link, but I can't do that on a free trial Unfortunately, so there are limitations to the free trial just bear that in mind as well get access to a lot of functionality But not all of it. So that's forms. Okay. I now just want to quickly walk you through reports Because they're really really useful especially when it comes to kind of building Dashboards and and and seeing you know pulling together information from various different resources So if I go on to project milestones, so this report as an example has pulled in all of the key milestones from the sheet project plan. So if I go back here, I'm actually going to close that off and I'm going to go open a new tab. So right click there, open a new tab. It's really useful. I'm going to go to right click here, open a new tab. So do you remember this project plan that I showed you earlier when it loads? Do you remember this? The quite overwhelming one? What this report has done is it's just pulled out all of the milestones. And you see how you can quickly analyze or you can quickly get a particular view by setting up a report rather than operating in this sheet view. So what you essentially do when it comes to a report is you just go through a building process. If you create a new report, it walks you through it step by step. But basically what you need to do is select where you want the data to come from. So that's obviously come from this project sheet. You then select the columns that you want to be included in the report, and then you select the filters. So in this particular report, it's basically saying that if the duration is equal to zero, it's going to show if the task name is not blank, it will show as well. There's two conditions. So that's essentially how it's got to this. Okay. Now let me just quickly show you a new report just to show you that process. I'll do this very quickly. this process in action so test report now i don't want a sheet summary report i want a row report so here's our test report now i'm going to show you how to go through that process as i say it all comes up first i want to choose sheet project plan i then need to select my columns so i don't want the sheet name i just want to have uh let's have uh i want to have Okay, the primary is already in there. Sorry, that's what I was looking for. I want start date, end date. And then let's just say next. So I wanted to bring all of this in. And then let's just say I wanted to see only those where the, I don't know, the start date was in the past. So it's in the past. Apply. And that was a bad example because it looks like everything was in the past. Let's put in the future. Now let's put is in the next few days. And let's put three. Let's put two. Nothing is going to show because none of the dates have that condition. But let's just say three of them did, then those three will be populated here. So it can be really, really useful. And you can leverage reports in dashboards. I want to show you that now, I think. I think we've done. a high level overview of reports. Hopefully you understand how they work, why you'd want to use them. So we're really nearly there now. I just want to show you dashboard. So I'm going to, I'm going to do complete. Now, one thing I should mention, you see these are probably, you see the strikethrough? That is some conditioning formatting. So if done is checked, then apply the strikethrough to the entire row. So that's what is essentially, that's why we're getting that strikethrough. That's a better example of conditional formatting. I should probably have mentioned that earlier. So let me go back here. I'm going to go to our browse. Remember, this is an important part of our solution. I'm now going to show you a dashboard. So this is a project dashboard. As you can see, it's very visual. It's showcasing a lot of different data points. These are the reports that have been created. So remember that project milestone report that I showed you earlier? The reason why you'd create that report is because you can then present it on a dashboard like this. So it's really, really useful. At risk task is another report that's been created. And I believe that the filter on that is anything that has this flag. And now it's appearing, okay? So if you were using this dashboard, you could quickly see all of those at risk tasks. That's the benefit of this. It gives you a high level overview. Now, when it comes to dashboards, this has obviously been pre-set up, but you basically press that pencil button. I'm not sure if you saw that. This is what it looks like. This is obviously like it live, but you can edit it to meet your needs. It's a blank canvas when you begin. And to edit the dashboard, you just press this pencil icon. And you'll notice it's all kind of drag and drop. So you see all these little squares. That's when you know you're in editing mode. And you can position this however you like. You can make things bigger or smaller. There's loads of different things you can do. Now, just imagine each one of these as a widget, and you need to set up those widgets first and foremost. So to do that, you press Add Widgets. So we can do a metric. This is an example of a metric. You can do a chart. That's an example of a chart. Shortcut. That links through to other resources. There are examples of shortcuts. report as I've just touched upon these are two reports title that's a title an image that's an image so that's basically how you you set up your dashboard you just go through this process obviously obviously you need to envision what you want your kind of dashboard to look like what you need to report on and things like that and it is a matter of you know you need to go and create these kind of metrics so if I click on edit this is being pulled in from sorry I wanted to check where that's coming in from the sheet project plan. So if I find that again, let's go to smart sheet tutorial, sheet project plan. It's pulling that in from here. Okay. That is where it's getting it from because it's that, that is the percentage complete of the whole project. So if I was just to show you how to create that in the dashboard, let's just say we wanted to do another one. Let's just say, no, actually for the purpose of this demo, let me say, I want to pull in, um, activity two is a hundred percent. The way we'd do that, we'd go on the dashboard. We click add widgets. We do metric, add data, Smartsheet tutorial. It's the sheet project plan. This is where the data is coming from. And then at this point, we just need to select where the data is being held, what cell. So it was activity two, 100%, press okay. And you'll notice we have this. Now we just need to change the formatting so it appears slightly different. So there you go, 100% complete. We could change the title. So this could be something like activity two status. or completion and then you can do various other kind of editing things here you know you can change how that looks you could do something like that you obviously do it in your brand colors or whatever you can change the size we can make this nice and big you get the idea that's essentially the process you can change the widget behavior as well so if you wanted to if you click this it will take you through to the underlying data sheet you know open the data source so you could go somewhere else you go somewhere else in smartsheet it's completely up to you and what you set up that's a high level overview i think I'm going to leave it here for the, you know, being a Smartsheet tutorial for beginners. I've actually gone into far more detail than I was hoping to and thought I would, but I do want to give you as much information as possible. As I say, if you want to become a Smartsheet power user, then do check out my Smartsheet training courses. I have one which will get you up and running with all the functionality far more and beyond what I've shown you here today. I also have a whole course on Smartsheet formulas, you know, leveraging those, choosing them if you encounter any issues with them. you know how to troubleshoot them i also have one all on a course all on reporting and creating highly visual dashboards that are really effective for various different stakeholders so you can kind of wow impress them give them the insights they need and just make sure that you're reporting effectively so i hope this video is useful if you have any questions comments feedback on this video on smartsheet or anything at all let me know down below and i'll get back to you as soon as i can with that said best of luck and i hope you have an excellent day

I just want to quickly mention who I am. My name is Jeremy. I'm a Prince2 practitioner. I'm a Smartsheet certified user, and I've been using Smartsheet in my corporate role for a leading global organization for over seven years with multi-million revenue generating projects.

This is what's really important as well. I've gone through the full life cycle of adopting Smartsheet from the initial solution design. all the way through to implementation, training, solution optimization, and much more.

So I am fully aware of all the intricate ins and outs of Smartsheet, its functionality on offer, and I've been kept abreast with all the developments as the platform has rolled out new features, functionality, etc. So what I'm now going to do is just walk you through this agenda. This has been chronologically put together so that you will go through using the tool.

at a pace that kind of works for you as a new user. So firstly, sign up accounts and permissioning. I do just want to quickly touch upon this.

I've opened up in another browser, smartsheet.com, the home interface. So this is what you will, you know, you'll navigate to smartsheet.com every time you want to access the platform. Now they do have a mobile application, which you may be using as well. The way Smartsheet works is it's a cloud application.

So in other words, as I say, you access it via the internet. You need to log into your account, as will other team members, but the beauty of all of this is all of the data is stored in the cloud. And at the same time, team members, you know, as people are entering data into Sheets, as long as you're saving and refreshing, you will see their data, their inputs in real time.

So this is essentially how you will sign up. Now, you can also get a free trial if you don't have one already to test the functionality out for 30 days, at least at time of recording. Now, in terms of pricing, you may be wondering about you know team members using your Smartsheet documents and everything that you create. I'll talk about this as the video goes on but do know that the way it typically works is you will get on a kind of a business plan where various users will be paying a fee to access the tool per month.

Now you can have free collaborators and I will touch upon that later so not everyone may need a license. If you are confused about what plans get on it's probably best to reach out to Smartsheet support. So that's how you sign up. That's how you're going to log into Smartsheet every single time.

That's exactly what I've done here. Now, you may notice that I'm on a free trial myself. I actually, as I say, use this in my organization every single day, but I need to keep my data protected. So I'm not sharing that with you.

So I'm going to sign that off. Now, the other thing I want to quickly mention is that in terms of permissioning, the way Smartsheet works is you can kind of lock down resources or share them with other users. Again, I'll show you that later, but you can have some confidentiality in this platform. Okay, so onto the general navigation and interface.

Now, as I've said, this is a web browser platform. And the beauty of that is that you can open up different tabs. So I've just shown you that as an example here, we've got the home interface as a separate tab. So you can, you know, you can have various different tabs of different sheets that you're working on, etc. So it's really, really useful for that.

So I've now opened up the other tab, which shows us the home interface. So this is what you're likely to see if you just signed up to a free trial. Let me walk you through it. On the left hand side, this is the kind of main panel that you will be using to move around your Smartsheet account.

So at the top, we've got home. The second one is notifications. So if anyone tags you in a comment or anything like that, this is where it's going to appear here, or maybe there's a request, an update request for you.

This is where you're going to find it. If you need to search for a particular file, you can do that via here if you know the name of it. This button is absolutely huge.

So this is where, if you can imagine on your desktop PC or laptop, laptop or Mac, where all your files are stored and how you can access them. That's essentially the browse functionality. So you're going to spend a lot of time here. Now I've created a workspace around this Smartsheet tutorial and I'll walk you through what a workspace is in a second.

I just want to finish off the general interface. If you've opened up anything recently, it will appear in this little recents section. If you've favoured any item, which I can show you how to do that.

Well, actually, as an example, let's just say I've favoured this one. then it will appear in this favorites panel. You can obviously remove that as well and it will disappear. You also have the ability to leverage work apps and integrations.

You can do that here. We've got the ability to start a new project, program or process from this button. And also there's something called a launcher, but that's probably beyond your scope as a beginner. Now, if you need to access your account at any moment, you can do that via the bottom left.

Now, this is really, really important because you may want to upgrade, you may want to change who can access what, kind of user management, group management, that can all be done by this interface. You can also change personal settings. So that's important if you wanted to change things like, you know, your job category or your profile picture, also kind of your settings as well.

If you want auto save on or off, how you want to be communicated with, you know, your... registered mobile devices, just things like that. Personal settings are quite important.

And there's also other things that you can do as well, like you can change your personal colors and your logo. So you can make your kind of Smartsheet account more branded to you. So it's really, really important.

Okay. So that's all from the left-hand side. Now that's the kind of general navigation interface. So I'm going to click the checkbox here and I'm going to change that to complete.

And the reason why I'm doing this, by the way, as well in this tutorial is I'm just showing you how this, this is the, this is a sheet. So. or a grid as it's known as in Smartsheet. This is the kind of core functionality of the tool, Smartsheet, if you like. And I'm just showing you this in action, how we can kind of leverage dropdowns, checkboxes, but I'll walk you through this as we go on.

I just wanted to give you a bit of an insight of me kind of using it as I'm providing you this tutorial. Next, I want to show you how we can organize files, if you like. So in Smartsheet, there's something known as workspaces. So if you can imagine a workspace as a kind of high level place to store files.

You then have folders. So this is a workspace. These are individual files. And what we could do is we could create a folder that kind of acts in between. Let's just call it project files.

And we could pretty much store all of these in that folder if we wanted to. You left click and drag it up and you can do all of them at the same time if you wanted to as well. Left click and drag it into there if you wanted to do that. So you've got workspace, folders, and then you've got the resources. You don't have to use folders.

but they can just be a good way of kind of keeping all of your data kept in suitable places. Okay, so that is now done. Sheets, reports, and dashboards. So let me quickly show you these.

So this is a dashboard, this is a report, and this is a sheet. And these are the three different types of resources in Smartsheet to be most aware of. As I say, I've shown you thus far a sheet, so this is a sheet, and this gives you all of the functionality you would expect.

If you've got any history of using Excel, then you'll have an idea of how this works. It's a spreadsheet functionality, and I'll be walking you through this as the video goes on. A report is a means of rolling up different data points from across your account, from various different sheets, whether that's individual sheets or a collection of sheets.

Again, I'll be walking you through this shortly. And then dashboards are pretty much a means of showcasing... KPIs and project data, but again, I'm going to be doing a deep dive as this video goes on. I just wanted to let you know that we've got three different types of files that you will be creating and leveraging when you use Smartsheet. So this is now done.

Templates and the Solution Center. The reason why I'm showing you this is you can create spreadsheets from scratch, you can create reports from scratch, and you can create blank dashboards from scratch. But one of the beauties of Smartsheet, and this is one of the things that have been kind of Over time, the tools got much better.

As if created a series of templates. So I'm going to show you how you can access them now. To get up running much faster. It's also good to just test the functionality and how it all works.

So to find the templates, you can either go into a new workspace, right click and click on browse templates. Alternatively, you can click on this here, this plus button. And these are all of the various templates available to us. So we've got a simple project plan, project schedule management.

Project with work breakdown schedule, a project management office solution, and project tracking and roll-up. Again, we can also import from Excel, Google Sheets, Microsoft Projects if we wanted to, if data's held there. And we can also create different resources from here.

Now, Gantt and Board and Timeline, they are all essentially part of the grid or spreadsheet view, and I'll show you that in a second. That's how you create them. Again, I'll show you that in a second.

Okay, one thing I haven't said at this point, which I just want to quickly touch upon, and I'm going to go back to this to show you, is that workspaces can be shared with other individuals, and you do that via the top right. So anyone who's shared to that workspace will see it, but Sheets is your kind of personal hub. So something in there, nobody else will be able to see, okay?

Just bear that in mind. It's locked down to you unless you share it further. So let's just say I wanted to create, I'm going to go browse templates. I want to... create you know, I want to create something from a template.

So there's various different solution templates. These are the project management ones. But if you look at this scroll here, this dropdown, there's various different ones available. So if you're in education, whether you're in finance, human resources, IT marketing, whatever, there's different options for you.

As an example, let me just click on finance. You're going to have like an annual business. Like these are all the templates that are available for you to use out of the box. Now you are going to need to edit them and refine them, but it just can give you an idea of what you can create.

And also you could edit them. to meet your needs as well. Okay, so let's just say project management, just because I'm a project manager.

Let's just go simple project plan. So I've chosen this template. Now it gives you a description of what it includes. You got instructional video if you wanted to, etc.

What you could do at this point, let's say we want to use it, we like the look of it, we just press create from template. And what that's going to do, this is going to show, and we just need to wait for this to essentially be created. Now this is what's been created for us.

and at this point we can invite other people to access it see it edit it etc now this section here this will be the email subject line this will be the message you want to send to them you want people to be notified about it otherwise they're not going to know about it you can also cc yourself and then you share and it will just be sent via email to them okay now this is essentially what i created from the template so we've got a dashboard we've got a project plan so this is the sheet the spreadsheet functionality and we've also got a report here So this is the three key different file types, as I've mentioned earlier in this video. OK, so I'm going to close this workspace panel. I want to go back to browse. Now, one thing you're going to need to do is refresh just so that we can see this new template set of templates available to us. There we go.

Simple project plan. That's what I just created. OK, and so I just showed you.

So that's the templates and the solution center. I would suggest exploring it and seeing what's available to you. I now want to walk you through sheets.

Because this, as I say, is the core functionality of Smartsheet. It's the spreadsheet functionality. So I've got various different things I want to show you in that.

Firstly, let me open one up. So let me open up the project plan I've created ahead of time. So you'll see here that, let me just show you actually. So you'll see here it's shown us the Gantt view.

Now you can see various different views in Smartsheet via this drop down here. So as you can see, the Gantt is kind of put over the top. of our grid view.

If I select grid view, it will remove the Gantt. At the same time, we can see a card view. So if you're kind of Kanban project management, this will make sense. And you can also, or a board, and you can also see a calendar as well. That's another thing that you can do.

And the way this is all kind of pulled together is via the dates that, so I've gone back to the grid view, via the dates that are included in the sheet. So we've got a start date and an end date, and that's how. the Gantt has been put together and the calendar view.

If we didn't have date columns, then they would not, you know, you couldn't see them. But let me just walk you through this now. So just like a normal spreadsheet, we've got columns here. So these have been created ahead of time. If you want to create a new column, you can go insert column left, insert column right.

We can delete the column. So I right clicked here, by the way. We can add column descriptions. If we want people to have an idea of what that column is all about, we can put filters on, we can sort, we can lock the column if we wanted to, we can hide it.

And there's a few other kind of customization options down here, which I'll show you in due course. Now, these are the rows. So these are the columns. These are the rows.

The way this has been set up is with some indenting. So this functionality here. And that enables a parent-child relationship.

So as an example, we've got toggles. So these were all created in each cell. And then we've just kind of used the indenting, as you'll see there, to enable that, you know, collapsed and things like that.

So let me just undo that. I want to get back to where we were. There we go. Here we go. So as I say, there's some colour formatting in here as well, just to differentiate the different rows.

You'll see there that there was a formula, but I'm going to walk you through formulas in a second. I'm actually going to come out of this because I think this is a little bit overwhelming if you're new to Smartsheet. I actually want to show you a brand new grid or sheet from scratch.

So let's call this spreadsheet grid. sheet. Okay. All those terms I've been using interchangeably throughout this video.

So this is a plain sheet. Let's just say we're creating it from scratch. The project plan you just saw was created along similar lines. So, you know, you just go in here, you type in the name you want the heading to be.

Same again for the second column. Now, when it comes to the column types, we have various different column types that we can leverage. We've got text numbers, drop-down list, dates, duration, contact list, checkbox. We saw that. In my agenda, we're leveraging that.

Symbols, auto numbers, created by, created date, modified by, modified date. Now some of these will be created by default. As an example, modified by, modified date.

If you selected this as an example. If I put something in here, oh, let me change that. Actually, I'm going to change this to that. I'm going to put it in insert column here and I'm going to put modified, not modified, I'm going to put created date, press okay.

Now, if I put something in here, you should see and save it. You should see that we've got a created date. So it's just a good way of kind of time stamping. And I just wanted to show you what was kind of possible with the editing column properties. But yeah, right click on here and that's how you kind of do all of that.

Now in terms of of, there's some other functionality I want to show you on the rows. What have I got here? So I want to show you now formulas because that can be useful. So what we can, you know, there's various different formulas and functions available to you.

If you Google smart sheet function list, then I'll do that now, actually. Smart sheet function list. Then you can access all of the different smart sheet functions.

they are function is another word for formula it's just smart sheet terminology and they're very very similar to excel they are slightly different but the main ones are kind of in there so count if as an example um we've got vlookups things like that you can leverage all of this it's probably getting into the more kind of advanced stuff here and i know this is a video for beginners but we can use different formulas so let's just say we wanted to put a formula in here it all starts with equals so let me just say um let me just show you an example one two three four five equals sum open bracket and then I'm going to select that cell range close bracket and we've got 15. So I just wanted to show you formulas I'm not going to go into too much detail I do actually have a whole course on using formulas so yeah I don't want to go into much more detail than that but you can leverage formulas and that's how you essentially do it. So let me just put that that in there. In terms of formatting so if you want to format your sheet that's all available via the ribbon at the top here so we can do things like I'm just going to put this in for now we can do things like obviously bolding italics underline we can put kind of a background color on each cell we can change the text things like that we can change where the cell text is lined you know is it left center you know is it top align middle line that kind of thing we can wrap as well so let's just say this went on for too long we can wrap the text so that oh why is that not worked It hasn't worked there, let me try a new cell.

But you can basically get it. So as you can see, that text is too long for the cell. But if you wrap, then you should be able to, it should drop on one line. But for some reason, it's not working.

I don't know why it should be. But trust me when I say, if you press the wrap button, it will appear underneath and it'll make the row larger. The thing with Smartsheet is you can't expand a row like you can in, say, Excel.

You can't drag this bit down. So wrapping is the way around that if you wanted to make a row. have a higher height if you like. Other things, you've got format painter and things like that.

So let's just say I want to remove that. And I like the format of this cell. We can do that. We've got conditional formatting. So as an example, if certain things happen in your sheet, other things will happen automatically.

So as an example, you just have to set up rules for that. So as an example, if primary column contains, you know, you just First thing you do is you select the column for the condition, then you select the criteria, and then if that's met, then you can apply the format. So let's just say, let me discard this. So let's just say, conditional formatting, if primary column says hello, apply bold green to the entire row, and then Cool. Let me refresh.

That should be working. Again, not quite sure why that hasn't come through, but you get the idea. That's how you set that up. So you've got conditional formatting available to you. Let me see.

What else have we got here? Let me just check this. If PromoCon, I'm not going to go into too much detail here.

But that's how you essentially how you set that up. We've also got the ability to highlight changes. So basically, if someone was to come in and make some changes on your sheet, you can see them just by pressing this toggle on or off.

You can change when the changes were made, the different background color, etc. You can put links into cell links to link between your resources. You can add images. You know, everything is available at the top. So I suggest that you come in here and check all of this out.

You know, all of the functions you have available to you. You can turn things into, say, currencies. you get the idea of percentages, things like that.

date format. So you've got loads of different options there. You can also, if I was just to do date, so I could turn this into a start date, and then we could have something like, you know, drop that into a date. You've got things like that. You can restrict it to dates only.

So you have all of this customization available to you. So that is the core thing here. If you want to save your work and you don't have all to save on, you can either press the short key, control S, or press this.

We can print the page if we wanted to as well. We can apply filters here. Now the way filters essentially work. is you give them a name and then you just kind of specify.

So let's just say filter one. That's obviously not a great description, but you know, primary column, if primary column is one of hello, apply, you know, and then what you can essentially do is have the filter on filter off. That's how you basically select your filter. So you just create a series of filters and then you can apply them. So I'm going to delete that.

I'm going to turn my highlight changes off. The other thing to be wary of is the right hand side on the sheet. screen or interface.

You can have conversations on the sheet level. So you could say something like, I need some, sorry, this is on the row level. On the sheet level, you can say something like, hey, at Bob, please, can you check cell 10 or whatever? And then hit enter.

If they're an account as part of your organization, they will receive a notification and they will see it in the notifications here. Okay. So that's one of the notifications that we've been kind of shown. Something we've done something on our account and that's where we've got an alert and you'll see there's a little one there due to that So you can have conversations on the sheet level So, you know if someone's open this they can see the conversation you can also add comments on the row level So as an example add comment we could say something like hello Please support this initiative hit go and then you'll see this little icon here And if someone clicks that you'll see that comment.

So you've got conversations which are really really handy You've got attachments. You can add attachments to a sheet. You can set up proofs.

There's a brand folder you can leverage. Update requests, I'm going to show you that in a second. You can publish this. You can see an activity log of all the changes on the sheet.

So this is really, really good from an audit trial perspective. So you can see as an example that I've done certain things like just some of the changes that I've made throughout this video thus far. You can also see a summary.

So what you can also do is you can create sheet summaries, which enable you to... Analyze information on the sheet so and kind of use these for reporting But I think that's beyond the scope of this video. So let's go back to this.

I've shown you formulas. I've shown you formatting Collaboration features. I just want to I've shown you comments and conversations, but I just want to show you alerts and update requests So something that you can do in smart sheet is you can set up alert So if you press that little bell button, so you can do it on the row level What you or click on the automation? that's another way of doing it as well but if you click on this little icon here set a reminder you can send yourself or another team member a reminder on the date that you specify and say something like you know we need to review this task and then you could basically just set it say for saturday um the first the 31st and i'm going to get a notification on saturday for that row press that and then that icon indicates that the reminder has been saved if you wanted to turn it off then you can just go back in here, delete the reminder.

You can edit the message and things like that. But that can be really good to make sure things are actioned, whether that's for yourself or team members. Now, the other thing I want to show you is that we can send update requests.

So instead of a notification, we can basically create a new request here. You just send it to the individual that you need an update from. You can change the subject line and put a message. So it could be, please update my sheet, or please come in and tell me the latest status of this project, or whatever it needs to be. And they're going to get an email.

And in that email, there'll be a link for them to open up the sheet and make the required changes. You can be CC'd. You can include all of the columns in that kind of screenshot that's going to be included in the email.

And you can change when you deliver it, whether you want it to be now or you can schedule it as well. So really, really handy. So I thought I would show you that.

So that is the collaboration features really to be mindful and aware of. The other thing I want to mention is forms. So forms enable us to essentially collect. data from an individual, whether they are using Smartsheet or an internal or external stakeholder, maybe they don't have access to Smartsheet, but this is a good way of getting kind of information. So let's just say this is a project.

In a project request sheet, you could have something like, you know, you could have something like project name. We could have, you know, budget required ETC. And... you know, you can set up this form in various different ways. You can have different fields, you can have required fields, you can have fields hidden, you can, you know, set up some validation as well if you wanted to, you can change, you know, how big the cell looks, etc, how many lines, what the default value is, you know, things like that.

You've got all of this customization options and you just run through the form. And once you're kind of happy with it, you hit save. And then if I click share form, we can get a link. Okay, it looks like I'm limited because I'm on a free trial, but you can get a link and they can basically open up this.

You can send that link, you know, via an email, via your internal internet site, whatever. And whoever opens up that link can submit their information into this form. Okay. Now in terms of settings, you can change how it looks, whether it's, you know, vertical, side by side or plain.

You've got some security options as well. So you can put a capture on it. You can change what happens when someone submits the form.

So they get a confirmation message. Is the form reloaded? You can change the messages that they receive. You can have new submissions should appear on the bottom of the sheet or the top of the sheet.

And then you can send emails of submissions as well. Now, when it says new submissions should appear on, I want to show you what I mean by that. If someone was to populate the sheet, it would go and automatically populate this sheet here.

Okay? Because the way it works is... If you can, like the way, the form is integrated with the sheet and they kind of work in tangent. So if I refresh this, we should see that, or go on form, manage, no, what I'm actually going to do instead is just test, no, we called it project name, didn't we? Project name, project.

budget if i then do this i'm actually going to save i'm actually going to delete that existing form by clicking on manage form i'm going to delete this so delete you can deactivate it as well if you didn't want to use it but let me create a new form you'll see that these are now in there by default it's copied it's copied it across from the columns that i created so one of the most effective ways to create a form is to simply build out all the fields that you want on that form maybe even the drop downs in the in this spreadsheet interface first and then click on forms, create form. Okay. Really, really useful to do that. So that's forms in a nutshell.

Let me just quickly, I'm going to go back to this screen. So to get to this screen, it's forms, manage forms. I want to, no, I didn't want to do that. Sorry. I wanted to click on, no, that's, that's, I was going to try and open up the URL, what it looked like.

If you were sending the link, but I can't do that on a free trial Unfortunately, so there are limitations to the free trial just bear that in mind as well get access to a lot of functionality But not all of it. So that's forms. Okay. I now just want to quickly walk you through reports Because they're really really useful especially when it comes to kind of building Dashboards and and and seeing you know pulling together information from various different resources So if I go on to project milestones, so this report as an example has pulled in all of the key milestones from the sheet project plan.

So if I go back here, I'm actually going to close that off and I'm going to go open a new tab. So right click there, open a new tab. It's really useful. I'm going to go to right click here, open a new tab. So do you remember this project plan that I showed you earlier when it loads?

Do you remember this? The quite overwhelming one? What this report has done is it's just pulled out all of the milestones. And you see how you can quickly analyze or you can quickly get a particular view by setting up a report rather than operating in this sheet view.

So what you essentially do when it comes to a report is you just go through a building process. If you create a new report, it walks you through it step by step. But basically what you need to do is select where you want the data to come from. So that's obviously come from this project sheet. You then select the columns that you want to be included in the report, and then you select the filters.

So in this particular report, it's basically saying that if the duration is equal to zero, it's going to show if the task name is not blank, it will show as well. There's two conditions. So that's essentially how it's got to this.

Okay. Now let me just quickly show you a new report just to show you that process. I'll do this very quickly. this process in action so test report now i don't want a sheet summary report i want a row report so here's our test report now i'm going to show you how to go through that process as i say it all comes up first i want to choose sheet project plan i then need to select my columns so i don't want the sheet name i just want to have uh let's have uh i want to have Okay, the primary is already in there. Sorry, that's what I was looking for.

I want start date, end date. And then let's just say next. So I wanted to bring all of this in.

And then let's just say I wanted to see only those where the, I don't know, the start date was in the past. So it's in the past. Apply.

And that was a bad example because it looks like everything was in the past. Let's put in the future. Now let's put is in the next few days.

And let's put three. Let's put two. Nothing is going to show because none of the dates have that condition. But let's just say three of them did, then those three will be populated here. So it can be really, really useful.

And you can leverage reports in dashboards. I want to show you that now, I think. I think we've done. a high level overview of reports.

Hopefully you understand how they work, why you'd want to use them. So we're really nearly there now. I just want to show you dashboard. So I'm going to, I'm going to do complete.

Now, one thing I should mention, you see these are probably, you see the strikethrough? That is some conditioning formatting. So if done is checked, then apply the strikethrough to the entire row. So that's what is essentially, that's why we're getting that strikethrough. That's a better example of conditional formatting.

I should probably have mentioned that earlier. So let me go back here. I'm going to go to our browse. Remember, this is an important part of our solution.

I'm now going to show you a dashboard. So this is a project dashboard. As you can see, it's very visual.

It's showcasing a lot of different data points. These are the reports that have been created. So remember that project milestone report that I showed you earlier?

The reason why you'd create that report is because you can then present it on a dashboard like this. So it's really, really useful. At risk task is another report that's been created. And I believe that the filter on that is anything that has this flag. And now it's appearing, okay?

So if you were using this dashboard, you could quickly see all of those at risk tasks. That's the benefit of this. It gives you a high level overview.

Now, when it comes to dashboards, this has obviously been pre-set up, but you basically press that pencil button. I'm not sure if you saw that. This is what it looks like.

This is obviously like it live, but you can edit it to meet your needs. It's a blank canvas when you begin. And to edit the dashboard, you just press this pencil icon. And you'll notice it's all kind of drag and drop. So you see all these little squares.

That's when you know you're in editing mode. And you can position this however you like. You can make things bigger or smaller.

There's loads of different things you can do. Now, just imagine each one of these as a widget, and you need to set up those widgets first and foremost. So to do that, you press Add Widgets.

So we can do a metric. This is an example of a metric. You can do a chart.

That's an example of a chart. Shortcut. That links through to other resources. There are examples of shortcuts.

report as I've just touched upon these are two reports title that's a title an image that's an image so that's basically how you you set up your dashboard you just go through this process obviously obviously you need to envision what you want your kind of dashboard to look like what you need to report on and things like that and it is a matter of you know you need to go and create these kind of metrics so if I click on edit this is being pulled in from sorry I wanted to check where that's coming in from the sheet project plan. So if I find that again, let's go to smart sheet tutorial, sheet project plan. It's pulling that in from here. Okay. That is where it's getting it from because it's that, that is the percentage complete of the whole project.

So if I was just to show you how to create that in the dashboard, let's just say we wanted to do another one. Let's just say, no, actually for the purpose of this demo, let me say, I want to pull in, um, activity two is a hundred percent. The way we'd do that, we'd go on the dashboard. We click add widgets. We do metric, add data, Smartsheet tutorial.

It's the sheet project plan. This is where the data is coming from. And then at this point, we just need to select where the data is being held, what cell.

So it was activity two, 100%, press okay. And you'll notice we have this. Now we just need to change the formatting so it appears slightly different. So there you go, 100% complete. We could change the title.

So this could be something like activity two status. or completion and then you can do various other kind of editing things here you know you can change how that looks you could do something like that you obviously do it in your brand colors or whatever you can change the size we can make this nice and big you get the idea that's essentially the process you can change the widget behavior as well so if you wanted to if you click this it will take you through to the underlying data sheet you know open the data source so you could go somewhere else you go somewhere else in smartsheet it's completely up to you and what you set up that's a high level overview i think I'm going to leave it here for the, you know, being a Smartsheet tutorial for beginners. I've actually gone into far more detail than I was hoping to and thought I would, but I do want to give you as much information as possible. As I say, if you want to become a Smartsheet power user, then do check out my Smartsheet training courses. I have one which will get you up and running with all the functionality far more and beyond what I've shown you here today.

I also have a whole course on Smartsheet formulas, you know, leveraging those, choosing them if you encounter any issues with them. you know how to troubleshoot them i also have one all on a course all on reporting and creating highly visual dashboards that are really effective for various different stakeholders so you can kind of wow impress them give them the insights they need and just make sure that you're reporting effectively so i hope this video is useful if you have any questions comments feedback on this video on smartsheet or anything at all let me know down below and i'll get back to you as soon as i can with that said best of luck and i hope you have an excellent day

Transcript for:Beginner's Guide to Smartsheet Features

Transcript for:
Beginner's Guide to Smartsheet Features