Smartsheet for Film Music Projects

Jim Well is an author, composer, guitarist,… the list is long. He’s also a Smartsheet customer that just seems to be good at everything. We’ve taken particular notice of this fact here at Smartsheet in that he seems to have effortlessly written a description of our product that bests our internal efforts.

I was hacking away at it again today making notes like:

• Smartsheet turns a work tracking spreadsheet into a living, breathing team member
• Instead of a dumb Excel document being shared online or through email, Smarsheets actively coordinate you, your team and even thousands of team members you don’t know via our paid crowdsourcing feature.
• Hundreds and thousands of tools exist for work tracking and management, and not one of them is as universally dominant as a plain old spreadsheet. Yet, with all that those plain old spreadsheets offer in flexibility and convenience, they lack mightily in the automation and coordination realm. Therefore, people routinely try out one of the thousands of specialty tools available. And, 9 out of 10 of them revert back to their spreadsheet after a few months.

Jim wrote a lengthy blog post describing Smartsheet and his use of it. One of our developers assumed that he’d worked with our marketing team to craft such a comprehensive overview. But, alas, we can take no credit for Jim’s skill. Here’s a short excerpt from his post entitled, Get Smart with Smartsheet that puts my hen scratchings in their place.

“SmartSheet is based on a spreadsheet-like paradigm, but has a feature set that orients it toward collaboration and project tracking rather than calculation of “what-ifs”. You create and customize your collaboration environment in terms of a set of … smart sheets. Each smart sheet is a collection of data and functionality with a purpose and structure that you define. On the surface, the look and feel of a smart sheet is similar to that of a conventional spreadsheet document – with rows and columns of cells, and user interface functionality that makes it easy for you to enter, view, and manipulate your data in whatever way your particular collaboration methodology might require.”

“As a composer using SmartSheet, you might think of designing a set of smart sheets that work like the documents you (and everyone else in the film music business) are already familiar with, such as spotting notes, timing breakdown, orchestral breakdown, recording session plan, track log, and so on. Up to a point, that particular approach could also be taken with a traditional spreadsheet program, such as Microsoft’s Excel. However, the unique palette of functions SmartSheet offers let you incorporate a much wider and more imaginative spectrum of collaboration-supporting data and functionality into a smart sheet than you could into an ordinary spreadsheet. And other SmartSheet features let you manipulate whole sheets and even collections of related sheets (workspaces) in ways that make sense for collaborative, project tracking, and administrative purposes. Why not use these capabilities to organizing a re-usable infrastructure that supports collaboration between the many people who collaborate on a film music project, including the composer, music editor, film director, assistants, orchestrators, orchestra contractors, recording engineers, conductors, musicians, accountants, and so on? I say, go for it.”

The uses for Smartsheet are as endless as the imaginations of our customers. And with thousands of customers using it for sales pipeline management, marketing campaign tracking, recruiting, and so on,… Jim is stretching our imaginations even beyond our optimistic expectations. Well done Mr. Well.

- Brent