Create a new sheet - Smartsheet Tutorial

- [Instructor] All of your work in Smartsheet happens in sheets. It's where all of the data you work with lives. So let's start by taking a look at how to create a new sheet. I'm logged into a new Smartsheet account, and again, I'm just using a free 30-day demo account here if you want to do the same and follow along with me and I haven't yet created any sheets. I'm going to come down and click the plus button here on the left which takes me to the solution center. Up here, I'm going to make sure create is selected and this is where you can choose any of these templates to create a new sheet from scratch or you can click import to import data from Excel, Microsoft Project, Google Sheets, or Trello. For this example let's go back to create and look at these templates. So you can see we have several types of Smartsheet items here to start with. I'll open some of these up so you can get an idea of what they look like. For example, I'll select the grid template and I'll just leave the default name of new sheet for now. So the grid template has no predefined columns. It's basically a blank document you can build completely from scratch. Notice they're just labeled primary column and then column 2, 3, 4, and so on. I'm going to go to File, Delete to get rid of this for now or we can look at another template like the task template which does have some predefined columns for task names, due dates and so on. We'll delete that and you can check out the rest of these templates to see what they offer and choose the one that best suits the type of sheet you want to work with. For now, let's select the grid template again to look at how to build a sheet completely from scratch. I'm going to call this one quarterly projects and click OK. And we'll just close this panel here to the right so we have more room to look at the sheet itself. So now we have a blank sheet and we can start customizing these columns. It's important to name your columns properly because that's how you sort and manage the reports and forms and other data you can manage with your sheets. Probably the most important column as its name implies is the primary column. It'll contain key information about each row in your sheet. So for example, if I were using the sheet to manage an upcoming project that involves several separate tasks I could double click this primary column header and I'll rename this column to task name. And then you can start entering the various tasks. I'll just type in a few here and I'm just pressing Enter or Return each time to go down to the next cell. And I'm just going to double click the divider between these two columns to expand the task name column so I can see all the text in here. Now, in the second column, I may want to list the employees to assign these various tasks too. I'll double click it and I'll call this assigned to. Now, we're also going to designate this column type as a contact list, and we'll talk more in detail about choosing column types a little bit later. And then I can start entering the names of the people assigned to each task. Now, if you've imported your team's contact info into Smartsheet, the fields will auto-fill as you type. Notice as I start typing Nick, he is in my contact list so I can just select him from here and he gets added in the assigned to column. But you can also just enter the person's name or their contact info. So it's important to designate each column with the right properties for the information that you want in those cells. For example, I'll call the next column status and then I can choose the column type. Now this is up to you to determine the properties that work best. So I might choose, for example, symbols which allows me to apply visual symbols to each cell to indicate in this case the status of each task. And it's up to you to determine what each symbol represents. For this example, I'll just select the red, yellow, green, and blue dots. Now, if I only want these symbols to appear in this column rather than allowing anyone to enter text as well I can enable restrict two symbol values only but I'll leave that off in case someone needs to enter info that the symbols can't express and I'll click OK. So now under this column, I can click this dropdown menu and set the status color for each row. Again, what each color indicates is up to you, but for example, maybe we're good to go with say the launch plan here. So I'll select green, and maybe for my project, blue indicates a completed status. So I'll come up to business case if that's done and select blue. Again, it's up to you to choose the best properties for each column. Now, if I find that this color system isn't working, I could come back and double-click the heading and change the column type to say a dropdown list. And I can delete the values that are in here and create my own. And when I click OK, I can come back in and select those value from the dropdown list that appears in each cell of this column now. So maybe here for blue, I'll choose complete and green will be in progress. So you would continue this way naming the columns you need and assigning the properties. I'll click the name the next two columns. Call this one start date, and I'm going to designate this as a date field, and I'll make this next column due date and also make it a date field as well. And I can enter the date either by typing the numbers or if I write it out, the date gets automatically formatted for consistency. Now, once you have your columns, you're free to rearrange them as needed. I could grab the status column, drag it to the left, or move it back. And you can delete unneeded columns either by right-clicking on them or by clicking the three dot button here to the right. And in this case, I'll choose delete column. Or if you need to add more columns, you can right click a column and choose to insert the column to the left or the right, which prompts you to give the column a name and select a column type. I'll just cancel that for now, but that's the basics of creating a new sheet from scratch in Smartsheet.