Learning Track
This Help Article appears in the Control Center learning track. Get the most out of this learning track by starting at the beginning.
This Help Article appears in the Control Center learning track. Get the most out of this learning track by starting at the beginning.
Global Updates: Dashboards allows you to make changes to your dashboard templates and roll those changes out across all existing projects.
Use Global Updates when you’ve made the following changes to a dashboard template:
Warning: Global Updates rebuilds your entire dashboard and relinks widgets to the reports and sheets every time you run an update. Changes are not reversible, so run the update on one project and check the results before you run it on all your projects.
In Smartsheet, go to the Blueprint Source Folder and make your changes directly to the dashboard template.
You can:
When you run the update, Control Center searches each project to find the dashboard that matches your dashboard template by either ID or name. It also shows you projects that don’t have a matching dashboard - either because a match could not be found or the dashboard was not included when the project was originally created. You can add the newly edited dashboard to those projects when you run the update.
Make changes directly to the dashboard template. This is the most reliable method for making sure the dashboard will match your projects, even if you change the name of the dashboard. The dashboards in the project are direct children of the dashboard template in the Blueprint Source Folder. Control Center easily identifies them as such and makes the changes.
Yes. When a dashboard in a project is updated, all the widgets will be removed and re-created to be identical to the template dashboard.
Yes.
No. Global Updates will only recognize dashboards, reports and sheets that were created through Control Center.
The project will appear in the “No matching reports found” section. Select the project in Global Updates, click Choose Dashboard, and then select Add new dashboard. Run the update to create the dashboard.
Yes. Unlike earlier Global Updates, you will see all projects created from the Blueprint.
Yes. You can run the update as many times as you want.
No. You can adjust the template report in the Blueprint Source Folder and run the Global Update again.
Widgets pull data from sheets and reports; the best way to avoid trouble with them is make sure the sources feeding the widget are consistent and up to date. If a widget on a project dashboard doesn’t work correctly after an update, check the following:
When building your Dashboard templates for use with Control Center, it’s important to structure your source data in a way that avoids potential issues with Global Updates.
Data in the Primary Column is used to identify the first and last row for the range of a chart or metric widget, even if you haven’t included this column as a part of your data range. Avoid using your Primary Column in widget data ranges.
If duplicate or blank values are found, the widget will break when you run a Global Update
Use one of the following options to structure your source data:
In this example, the Primary Column contains duplicate values (“Very High”, “High”, etc.). By using hierarchy, issues resulting from duplicate values can be avoided when running Global Updates. This is because the lookup for the Primary Column returns the parent row and the child row.
NOTE: With this method, it is still possible to have duplicate values if you have two or more parent rows with the same name, and child rows with the same name under those separate parent rows.
If a Report is used in a chart widget for your Dashboard templates and has no results to create a chart from, it will not map correctly when you provision your projects. Make sure you have at least one data point in your report template.
See Charts in Dashboards for more information.
Errors related to missing data can occur if the referenced cells from a template sheet have never contained any data. To avoid this, ensure that your template sheets have some cell history by right-clicking the cell and selecting “View Cell History”.