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Smartsheet Portfolio Progress Timeline

Create a timeline of your Smartsheet project portfolio that highlights the active phase of each project

When you're managing a portfolio of projects in Smartsheet, it's important to understand where each project is at a high level. OnePager can identify the active phase of each project in your portfolio and make it stand out on your timeline so that you can see the status of your entire portfolio at a glance.

Smartsheet Portfolio Progress Timeline 15-Day
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OnePager is timeline software for Smartsheet works with one or multiple projects. Don't have OnePager yet? You can download a free trial and try it out today.

  1. We'll start with a portfolio of six Smartsheet projects:

    Smartsheet project with predecessors and successors.

  2. Clicking on one of the projects in the Smartsheet portfolio, we'll see that we have the same five phases for each project. If you look at the % Complete column for each project, you can see which phases are complete, which phase is currently underway, and which phases haven't started yet:

    Smartsheet project with predecessors and successors.

    In this example, Phase I has already finished, since its percent complete is 100%. Phase II is underway, since it's at 71% complete. Phase III and beyond are at 0%, so haven't started yet. Each of the projects in our portfolio will have a different active phase, but generally follow the same pattern.

  3. To build your portfolio timeline from Smartsheet, double-click the OnePager icon on your desktop. From the Start screen that appears, choose New.

    OnePager Bundle Start screen.

  4. On the import wizard, go to Select > Browse Smartsheet:

    Import dependencies from Smartsheet.

    If this is your first time using OnePager with Smartsheet, you'll be asked to log into your Smartsheet account.

  5. Holding down the Ctrl key on your keyboard, select all of the Smartsheet projects that you want to import from your portfolio and click OK:

    Select multiple Smartsheet projects from your portfolio.

  6. Give your portfolio chart a name, and tell OnePager to filter based on whether a task is a Summary back in Smartsheet. This will ensure that only phase-level tasks are brought in, not individual tasks:

    OnePager's import wizard for Smartsheet, which will filter on Smartsheet summary tasks.

  7. Click Next followed by Create New Chart. OnePager will import your selected summary rows from Smartsheet. Initially, we get a portfolio timeline that shows each phase of each Smartsheet project, like this:

    Timeline of multiple Smartsheeet projects from a portfolio.

  8. Let's simplify the chart by setting all of the colors to blue and changing the shapes from rectangles to chevrons. Go to Home > Chart Properties > Task Bars, and make these two changes:

    Change the color and shape of tasks in a Smartsheet timeline.

  9. Click Apply and the portfolio timeline should now look like this:

    Smartsheet portfolio timeline with a chevron for each phase.

  10. Back in Home > Chart Properties > Task Bars, click on Manage Rules in the Conditional Formatting section and create rules that apply different formats based on how far along each phase of the project is:

    Conditional formatting assigns a different color and size to the active phase of each project from Smartsheet.

    In cases where percent complete is 0% or 100%, we know that the phase is either complete or not started, so can color the chevrons gray. In all other cases, where percent complete is greater than 0% but less than 100%, we know that the phase is active, so can be colored blue and made slightly taller than the neighboring phases.

  11. Here is the end result:

    Smartsheet portfolio timeline that highlights the active phase of each project.

That's it! See how easy it is to create your own portfolio progress timeline from Smartsheet by downloading a free trial:

15-Day
Free Trial