Likelihood to Recommend For teams and users who are very familiar with Excel and its mode of operation, Smartsheet will feel like a walkover. If you have a number of users who use Excel or Google Sheets for their personal project management then you will find this tool to be very useful and somewhat familiar.
Teams that may be used to other project management suites or styles would find Smartsheet a bit challenging to adapt to, as formulas and formatting can be challenging to adapt to.
Read full review XaitPorter is ideal when a large document, containing many (preferably independent) sections is being created by more than five writers across different office locations and is subject to review by multiple reviewers and requires formal approval. It is particularly suited for external documents which are to be delivered as a non-editable PDF file.
Read full review Pros The easy to use dashboard has enabled us get comprehensive view of projects across the entire business. It has streamlined internal communication with ease of sharing information across different teams. Smartsheet automates our workflows, enhances collaboration and ensures there are no data silos. I like that it saves time for us and ensures we spend less time switching between apps. Read full review This tool gives us the opportunity to work together. We always work in the last revision. We can write comments as we go along and all involved will see it straight away. We can structure it the way we want/our the way customer wants it and print the whole book in one go. We are sure that pictures/text/tables are where they are supposed to be (they have not moved around the document as it does when using Microsoft Word). Read full review Cons Smartsheet set up is similar to Excel, yet when you upload an Excel file, things like conditional formatting are lost. Smartsheet has its own conditional formatting, and you have to reinstate the rules. It would be great if those would apply automatically once a file is uploaded Some Smartsheet management and access rules can take some tweaking to work properly. This may be a case of offering more info to admins so they can apply these better and with more efficiency Read full review It would be helpful to improve functions used to organize and reorganize sections. They work fine, but could be retooled for ease of use. Simple drag-drop over the tree-view from the primary navigator (not only in the dedicated dialog for reordering sections) would be very good. It would be good to support simple flagging or tagging of sections to indicate whatever is meaningful to the user (e.g., to flag a section as imported text that needs formatting, or a section that is high priority for review). The icons do change to indicate predefined workflow states (e.g. approved), but there isn't support for a user-defined tag, perhaps with the ability to filter by tag as many newer applications can do. That would be handy. These aren't criticisms so much as product enhancement suggestions. The editor is ok but could be tuned up a bit. For example, styles in the toolbar dropdown apply only to the whole paragraph. It's hard to indent text. The button tool doesn't consistently remove the button attribute on an existing button; works sometimes, sometimes not. Little stuff. Overall it's adequate for text creation. The process of defining templates and styles appears to be a black art. While it's something you don't do often, it should be simplified and better exposed to ordinary admins. The ability to have more than one section open at a time in the editor would be fantastic. Great productivity tool. Word import/export could be cleaner. The ability to export to html with user-defined style sheets would open new markets for Xait. If the product had that, we'd use Xait to maintain our online help site too. The ability to link to externally stored images rather than lock them inside the Xait library would be huge, as we've expressed to the support team. We manage hundreds of images (diagrams, screen shots etc.) that are used throughout the company, not just for Xait documents. We would like to store them on a file system (e.g. Dropbox) and have them update into Xait automatically when the master copy is modified. This is a very important capability, though in fairness we didn't find it in other products either. Explicit support for Dropbox/Google Drive/Box would be one way, but dynamic linking a la Microsoft Word would be fine, maybe even better. Read full review Likelihood to Renew It definitely meets our needs as far as organizing and archiving our tasks and files. As we train more staff to view it, I see opportunities for more improvement, which I am sure this program can handle. I look forward to seeing continued improvement from Smartsheet on their capabilities and functionality.
Read full review There are too many positive aspects versus negative.
Read full review Usability Smartsheet is very easy to learn. However, while I have been able to pick it easily, Microsoft Excel and Project super users that I have trained on Smartsheet get bogged down in the differences and can find it frustrating. Explaining the differences ahead of time and why Smartsheet is being chosen instead of a different software seems to counteract those reactions
Read full review We find it to be intuitive to use with a simple menu and right-click based functionality in place.
Read full review Reliability and Availability XaitPorter is always there even though we have issues with outages (suddenly the network does not work, but that is internal issue)
Read full review Performance Our reports/Tenders complete in a reasonable time frame, actually faster than Word. We have not integrated with other systems or softwares.
Read full review Support Rating I give this rating because it fills a niche in the market.
MS Project scares many away from proper task management but there are limited tools our there, especially cloud-based that are mobile-friendly. Smartsheet fills this market gap, especially for small to medium-sized businesses. IT is not fair to compare it to
MS Project , but fairer to see what gaps it fills.
Read full review They have a clear method for reporting any issues and work hard to get a resolution, keeping me informed of progress.
Read full review In-Person Training He was really good. He came from Xait and trained us for several days. He got all involved and answered the questions asked. He was a professional trainee
Read full review Online Training The online training was really good. They know the way of getting people involved and they answered all questions asked. They were there for us.
Read full review Implementation Rating It's absolutely paramount to take a few minutes to actually play with the software. It's nearly impossible to do anything wrong or make a mistake which cannot be fixed easily. Under the help menu is Live Training option. After you familiarize yourself with the commands, watch the live training for some in depth understanding of how to make the software fit your needs perfectly.
Read full review I was really satisfied with the implementation
Read full review Alternatives Considered Jira and
Redmine are much more robust and technologically advanced project management solutions. I enjoy using either when managing a very large project. However, I prefer to use Smartsheet for my smaller to medium sized projects. As for
Google Drive - I would say that Google sheets and Smartsheet are almost identical in my opinion when it comes to functionality. Personally I prefer to manage smaller projects via
Google Drive , but it is a personal preference!
Read full review The standard product for many years has been Microsoft Word. Some have tried to use SharePoint as a collaborative tool, but it is not suited for the purpose and is generally very user un-friendly. It is not intuitive and we have very few persons with any competency in it. Porter is easy to pick up and the new interface is very intuitive, and the way that Porter works removes many of the typical layout and formatting choices that made Microsoft Word so difficult for the average employee. It also greatly simplifies and reduces the amount of corrective work that tender support staff used to have to do. We are not aware of any product in the market that comes close to Porter. It is an ideal product that was purpose built for collaborative writing.
Read full review Scalability I just love the system
Read full review Return on Investment This has really opened up collaboration across teams. A lot less working in silos. It hasn't fully replaced any one tool so it means having to go to another place. Hopefully, we can eliminate a tool or two in the next six months. Read full review Too soon to tell. Right now we're still at the near end of the value chain - it still seems expensive given the outputs to date. But we have a lower proposal volume than some companies, so you need to factor that in. Also, the named user licensing is restrictive and problematic in a small company where people perform multiple roles and may dip in and out of the proposal development process over a period of weeks or months. A concurrent user model would be much, much better for us, though I understand you'd need to figure out a way to handle email notifications. Read full review ScreenShots