Tips from Support: Power of the Primary Column

This post is the first of a weekly series of tips and ideas from our oh-so-wise support team.  We’ll share answers to some of the most commonly asked questions, point out features that you may not have had a chance to explore, and other tips for success!

In Smartsheet you’ll find one column header that is a little bolder (literally!) than the others. This is the Primary Column and it has some powerful and unique functionality to help you organize your work. Soon you’ll see that comparing the Primary Column with all the rest... well, it’s like comparing apples and oranges!

In the Primary Column, you can establish Hierarchy with your data, the ability to group and relate rows to each other.

Say you’re responsible for organizing quarterly board meetings, and other key gatherings. Use the Primary Column to keep track of major tasks, under which you can indent necessary steps to show a relationship among all of the work your team is tackling.

Click on the +/- symbol within the Primary Column to expand or collapse your view – it’s easy to quickly glance at the bigger picture or drill down into granular details. Use the indent and outdent buttons to establish your hierarchy of rows.  When subtasks are all collapsed, you can move them all together to another location in your sheet.  

This video goes into more detail about how to create Hierarchy in Smartsheet.

Some other special things to know about the Primary Column:

• The functionality of the Primary Column extends past the grid view of your sheet.  Smartsheet uses the text in the Primary Column as the subject of email alerts, the title in the Calendar View, and to orient Gantt chart PDFs.

• The Primary Column is the most important column of your entire sheet – and each sheet can only have one.  As you work with your sheet, you may find that a different set of data is more appropriate for the Primary Column, and changing your sheet structure around is a piece of cake. Start by inserting a new blank column to copy and paste the data from your original Primary Column into. Then simply paste your new data into the empty Primary Column.

Til next time, dig in and explore!

- Support Team