Whether you know someone who “over-shares” on social media, or feel like you hear WAY too much about the Kardashian family, it’s hard to escape being inundated with details you don’t need to know.
So, today we’re going to look at how to prevent sharing TMI (too much 
information) in Smartsheet. While there are a ton of times where it’s appropriate to share your entire sheet with teams, vendors, or clients, there are are times you want (and need) to be more selective.
Picture this:
- Planning a Massive Event– Say you’re planning a huge event with hundreds of vendors and volunteers. It might not be helpful to share your entire sheet with every single contributor. Talk about information overload!
- Working with Multiple Agencies– What if you’re working on a giant ad campaign with a few different agencies? It may not be beneficial to share the entire campaign with each agency, but rather give each one a way to focus on their portion of the project.
- Executing a Large Construction Project– With so many moving parts and outside contributors, you may want to keep individual contractors focused on their contribution. Not everyone needs to see the full picture.
- Managing a Complex Team– It’s a piece of cake to keep team performance objectives centralized in Smartsheet. While it’s beneficial for your employees to have access to shared goals – and helpful for you to have one repository for shared expectations – it’s not something that you need your entire team to see.
This week, you’ll learn how to use reports to share key information from your sheet with others, without giving them access to your entire sheet. Perfect for using Smartsheet as your master resource to track all the little details AND keep some information private.
Use Reports to Send Information
Let’s use the construction example from above to illustrate how you can share information from your sheet with others, without adding them as a collaborator to your sheet.
Here’s a sheet where the entire construction project is planned out, and every single vendor is included. It’s a big picture of how the smaller pieces fit into the construction project:
The contractor ‘Reliable Roofing’ is assigned to several tasks shown in the sheet above. You want them to know exactly what they are responsible for and when their deadlines are, but that’s it. They don’t need to see what other the contractors are contributing.
Reporting is an easy solution to send specific information to others, without adding them as a collaborator to your sheet.
Here are a few steps to take:
- First, run a report for all jobs that are contracted to Reliable Roofing. Create a new report just as you would a new sheet – click the Create New icon at the top of your account and select Blank Report. Use the Report Builder to identify all tasks assigned to Reliable Roofing.
- After running the report, you can supply the contractors with a copy by sending the report via email by choosing to Send as Attachment. To send as an attachment, click the sheet icon on the left tool bar. When the Send as Attachment form pops up, enter the recipient’s email address(es) in the To field.
- Next, you can automate this process. In the Send as Attachment form, there is an option to set a delivery schedule for your Report. You can determine how often you’d like an updated report to go out: daily, weekly, or monthly. This is super handy and saves a ton of time, especially if you’re managing longer term projects or ongoing processes.
- When you want feedback from Reliable Roofing, you can send an Update Request. This way, you can get feedback or status updates from them without exposing them to the entire sheet.
So next time you have a big, detailed sheet with many participants, try using reports to share and gather specific information with them. They’ll thank you for it!
Til next week, dig in and explore!
- Support Team