August 16, 2018

Excel on steroids! If you manage a team that manages a ton of projects, Smartsheet is a LIFESAVER! It's familiar, dynamic, and comprehensive in its reporting and dashboard features.

Item: Smartsheet
Rating: 8
Author: Megan Gates

Megan Gates

Sr. Partnership Development & Events Manager

McGraw-Hill EducationPublishing, 1001-5000 employees

Score 8 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Smartsheet to share dynamic project info and manage multiple projects with changing information on a daily basis. Our entire organization uses an enterprise level account, but we are power users in our department. My team manages over 75+ projects with multiple moving parts and I need an easy way to see a snapshot of daily progress on all projects, as well as a dashboard view that includes statuses. Smartsheet does just that. We think of it as Excel on steroids, that you can maintain in a live, real-time environment. It has made my team faster and more accurate for sure.

Pros and Cons

Dashboards. If you know how to use them, they can combine the info and data from multiple sheets into one comprehensive view. This is crucial if you are managing a team that manages multiple projects in Smartsheet. It's like having all of the up to date, real time info at my fingertips.
Love that they went mobile. I can check info onsite when I'm traveling without having to login to my computer or have my computer with me.

I would love to see the ability customize some of the forms with our own branding.
I would love the ability to be able to delete a sheet, even if I was not the owner. Perhaps maybe give an overall administrator status. We have folks who have left the company and I cannot delete their old sheets. It gets very cluttered.

Return on Investment

Because we have the ability to enter in expenses and financial info in a real time manner, I am able to run reports more quickly to provide accurate numbers for ROI calculation. The C-Suite loves getting budget info on time!
From what I understand, choosing an enterprise level agreement saves the company money overall, rather than having a bunch of different departments, some using it, some not.
We are more GDPR compliant. That is important to our customers, so it is important to us.

Alternatives Considered

Trello

Trello is great for the visual person, but it doesn't have the simple spreadsheet capacity that Smartsheet has. If you are proficient in Excel, you don't need much training to use Smartsheet, whereas, Trello is a whole different environment.

Other Software Used

Concur Expense, Marketo, CrowdCompass, Qualtrics

Likelihood to Recommend

Again, if you are the head of a department and manage multiple project managers, Smartsheet will keep you organized, keep your info up to date and safe online, and will give you the tools you need to access on desktop or mobile. It will create efficiencies just by convenience alone. It also helps our organization become more GDPR compliant. With a million different Excel spreadsheets floating around, saved on different laptops, it's hard to track and manage privacy issues. With Smartsheet, it's all online, in one spot and deleted that data is easy.