Smartsheet Tutorial for Project Managers (WITH Reports and Dashboards)

About this video

A tutorial that builds a Smartsheet project plan from scratch, then rolls it up into portfolio reports and dashboards. After a 30-day free trial, the presenter skips templates, creates a Marketing workspace and a Grid sheet called Q3 Ad Campaigns. Columns are set deliberately: Task Name as primary, Assigned To as a Contact List, Start and End Date restricted to dates only, Status as a restricted dropdown list, and Health as Symbols using red, yellow and green traffic lights. September campaign tasks are grouped by indenting rows two through seven under a parent row; copying, pasting and outdenting that block creates an October campaign. In Gantt View, enabling Dependencies adds Duration and Predecessors. Dependencies use Finish-to-Start as the most common type, alongside Finish-to-Finish, Start-to-Start and Start-to-Finish, with optional lag; shifting an early start date moves the chain, and Duration zero turns Go Live dates into milestones. Baselines snapshot original dates so variance shows in the Gantt. Formulas use NETWORKDAYS for Total Work Days, SUM(CHILDREN) for parent rollups, and Days Worked divided by Total Work Days converted to a column formula and formatted as Percent Complete. Conditional formatting highlights a row pink when Status is not Completed and End Date is in the past. Communication stays in-sheet: sharing the workspace, per-row conversations with @mentions, attachments, and Proofs for annotating a PDF and closing review. Automations follow trigger, conditions and actions — an assignment-change alert, and a weekly update request sent only to the Assigned To contact for incomplete, started tasks, testable to yourself first. For reporting he adds an Is Project checkbox, Expected Days Worked and Expected Percent Complete, and a Latest Update column of type Latest Comment, then builds a Row Report across Marketing sheets filtered to Is Project checked, grouped and summarized by Health. The dashboard adds a horizontal bar chart of projects by Health, a completion versus expected completion chart from an ungrouped copy of the report, and the full report embedded with its Gantt.

Key takeaways

• Model work as parent projects with indented subtasks, and define column types and restrictions up front — Contact List, date-only, restricted dropdowns and symbols — to keep data clean.
• Enable Dependencies in Gantt View to drive dates automatically: Finish-to-Start is the default pattern, Duration zero marks a milestone, and Baselines reveal slippage via variance.
• Use NETWORKDAYS for task effort, SUM(CHILDREN) for parent rollups, and convert a Percent Complete formula to a column formula so it applies to every row.
• Replace status chasing with in-sheet conversations, Proofs for document review, and automations built as trigger plus conditions plus action — notably weekly update requests routed to the Assigned To contact.
• Separate tasks from projects with an Is Project flag, then build Row Reports filtered to projects and visualize them on dashboards with health charts and an embedded detailed report.

Episode details: published August 15, 2024 · 24:03 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Kevin Stratvert’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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