Smartsheet Valuable Features

MD
Business Analyst

What I found most valuable in Smartsheet is its project customization feature. It's a great solution because you can add in your own WBS. You can see it in Jira style, Kanban, and you can even do Agile and Waterfall. 

Another feature that's valuable in the solution is when you have those connections, you have that API, you have a sandbox, and you can make a solution, it's a tremendous product because you can pull data.

Smartsheet tries to enforce people to use their Control Center which costs $20,000, but what's good about that module is that it allows you to also create some cool solutions that even the Smartsheet team didn't know. In the end, I had a check done by Smartsheet on our system and they said, "You recreated Control Center, and we don't know how you did this, but it's insane." They were extremely shocked. They could only offer a dynamic view, which I think is what they wanted to try and push, but that would entail sleepless nights.

Smartsheet pushes out weekly updates because it's still new, and its team is trying to make it a nice product even for people that want to use it out-of-the-box for their enterprise solution, and this could be another pro in the solution.

I haven't seen anything like Smartsheet before. It is great and it is an amazing solution. It allows cross-functional global communications with offshore teams, and this means those teams can do the work, put in all that's needed and what's been done, have scrum meetings, and have all the data and documentation attached to row-level. If the teams do use AI, the data can be corrected, updated, and sent back. You can pull the data out, put it into a Data Lake or Hadoop, or any kind of SQL, or Oracle, or whatever data system that you have, and you can streamline it out of the system just like you can with Excel.

Smartsheet is a great product if you know how to use it right. The free version allows you to use the basic Smartsheet abilities, then for the enterprise edition, there's a lot more you can work on and do with it.

Smartsheet is very secure. It's really impressive if you can use it right and you can train your team.

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Ian Herzing - PeerSpot reviewer
Resource Manager at a non-tech company with 11-50 employees

We like Smartsheet's workflows, automation, and low-code capabilities. I don't know of any other project management tool with low-code functionality designed for project managers. 

For example, you can build a workflow to alert your marketing director when assets have been approved. I can't think of another tool that has the same low-code functionality.

The capabilities of connecting your project portfolio together helps remove administrative work. That's Smartsheet's selling point, removing the manual work from your day-to-day with automation, alerts, and workflows so you can focus on managing the project itself.

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Asma Ali - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager at a government with 10,001+ employees

The ability to update in real-time before meetings is great. 

The ability to connect documents to builds or whatever that are being worked on or related is helpful.

Multiple people can contribute to it. Instead of the project manager or myself having to collect information from people and then put it in, they can just go in and update their stuff weekly or whatever by themselves.

The initial setup is easy. 

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Buyer's Guide
Smartsheet
February 2024
Learn what your peers think about Smartsheet. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: February 2024.
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James John Wilson - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Development Manager at Freelancer

It is my favorite project management tool. The reason for that is that it is very flexible. It is much easier to use than Microsoft Project in terms of creating custom fields. It is very similar to Excel. So, people understand it, which makes it a little bit easier to use for most users. From my experience, most people don't like using Microsoft Project if they need to create any kind of custom column. I was never unable to create the functionality I needed.

It has got a really nice workflow engine. It is helpful if you want to let people know based on a date or criteria. Anytime a new project was submitted to the project intake table, I would get an email. You can also send the email to Slack or a whole host of different types of targets. If a task was due next week, I could have the system send an email that says, "Hey, you've got a task coming up next week," and then, if it was late, I could have it send an email or a Slack message to somebody. That was very helpful.

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Natalija Prodanovic - PeerSpot reviewer
Global IT PMO at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

The feature I found most valuable is Smartsheet's collaboration capabilities. You can easily share your sheet with someone and communicate with them. Everyone can have their own milestones. Smartsheet can also be used for project management since it's really customizable, much like an Excel sheet. To create workflows, you can use a template or build your own from scratch.

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Ciprian Porutiu - PeerSpot reviewer
Vice President, Operations & Delivery | Change Management | Digital Transformation at Marsh Limited

The dashboard feature is the most valuable aspect of the solution. The ability to put a lot of stuff easily into various sheets is something that I'm using particularly often. 

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Blake Clifford - PeerSpot reviewer
Adjunct Professor & Project Manager at USCCG

I'm consulting with a company that uses Microsoft Project, which isn't cloud-based. Smartsheet is cloud-based, so it's more accessible. We need not worry about saving versions of the file when someone makes changes. For example, Microsoft Project locked up while someone was saving a file, and we couldn't access the original file properly. 

Smartsheet offers more than Project because it's similar to a table-based, database-type system. It's like a hybrid between Excel and project software. We were able to enter the formulas and do much of the automation. We added budgets to it and linked them to a vendor page. Smartsheet let us integrate the budget into the project seamlessly. With Project, we needed to open up Excel. 

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JS
National Sales Manager at a wholesaler/distributor with 1,001-5,000 employees

The most valuable features of Smartsheet are its collaboration tools, the ability to centralize and prioritize projects, and robust reporting capabilities. 

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TA
IT Project Management Lead at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

The ability to build a quick dashboard and give management insight into the progress of the project itself is probably one of the most beneficial pieces.

One of the nice things about Smartsheets is that we can use it to notify people who have assigned actions. It integrates very easily with email, etc. We can just set it up for certain reminders. The report tools are very easy. I'm pretty impressed with it so far.

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Donee Damore - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Director Of Project Management at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

For doing project plans what was really valuable is the ability to do a predecessor. You could say "This has to happen before this can happen," then if you change a date, it changes automatically, and you don't have to go back in and change all of those dates.

I liked that you could save it as an Excel spreadsheet or a PDF. I also liked the fact that you could use a Gantt chart, and you could get different viewpoints on the project plan.

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JG
Associate General Research at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees

I really like how it turns into a dashboard. It has a feature for creating in-built dashboards.

It is easy to set up. 

The pricing is reasonable. 

It is stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

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JC
Contract Programme Manager at a manufacturing company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Smartsheet is a really good tool for collaboration. If I put somebody’s name into an assignment, they get an email. They know what they’re being assigned, and they can access it. I don't have to run around chasing people. The emails help in workflow efficiency. In terms of overall planning, capacity consolidation across plans is quite useful, but it takes a lot of effort to get it to work properly. It's not that intelligent, but it's better than Microsoft Project. From a workflow perspective, it's pretty powerful.

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Gaithre-Muren - PeerSpot reviewer
Corporate Paralegal at a tech consulting company with 1,001-5,000 employees

As I am in the corporate legal department, I have to deal with a number of contracts and sometimes it's hard to keep up with email transactions. Having the tracker sheet and being able to build dashboards and workflow has been quite valuable.

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YvesDene - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Consultant CSV at QbD

This solution provides easy collaboration and allows non-building users to use the system without requiring a license. 

Only licensed users who can create sheets and collaborative spaces are charged for their usage.

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SP
Associate Director at a pharma/biotech company with 11-50 employees

The management aspect is the most valuable. You can also prioritize tasks and then view tasks by priorities as passports. There are also predecessors, and you can link activities that are interconnected and communicate on the same platform with collaborators and team members.

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TamerNasr - PeerSpot reviewer
Executive at Nazeq

To me, one of the most powerful features of Smartsheet is being able to email others.

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SandeepKumar15 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Developer at ZNet Technologies Private Limited

The most valuable feature of Smartsheet is it can be highly customized.

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Siba Shankar  Reddy - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Information Technology Analyst at Applied Materials

The solution's most valuable feature is the ability to create dashboards for services. It helps in keeping a tab on multiple projects at once.

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Mario Vismara - PeerSpot reviewer
GPO - PMO - Global Manager at Wolters Kluwer

Smartsheet is easy to use.

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Ron Drake - PeerSpot reviewer
PM/CM Practice Leader at COWI A/S

The valuable feature for us is the ability to coordinate and share information at a relatively inexpensive cost because you can have a lot of shared users that don't have to be licensed.

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Kwaku Anyemedu - PeerSpot reviewer
Accountant at Center source for family support

It operates as an enhanced and versatile version of Excel, offering a wide range of capabilities that allow you to accomplish various tasks and operations.

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NH
Report Analyst at GigaNET

The report preparation and dashboard creation are valuable. We can collaborate within the teams easily. The product is easy to use.

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SergioRamirez - PeerSpot reviewer
Sales Director at Esource Capital

The product simplifies project management. We have worked with other project management tools and found that Smartsheet simplifies the overall interaction in an organization. You can do everything from the software. 

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Tinoop KR - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Sales Compensation Analyst at Rubrik

The tool reduces manual labour and it is user-friendly.

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RS
Service Deliery Manager at a comms service provider with 201-500 employees

The most valuable feature of Smartsheet is its intuitiveness, ease of use, and overall simplicity.

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Buyer's Guide
Smartsheet
February 2024
Learn what your peers think about Smartsheet. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: February 2024.
763,955 professionals have used our research since 2012.