Smartsheet is used to collaborate on project timelines, documents, calendars, tasks, and other works.[2][3] According to IDG, it is "part office productivity, part project management, part document sharing... [it] is trying to be the central hub for how people work."[4] Smartsheet competes with Microsoft Project.[5] It combines some of the functionality of Microsoft Project, Excel, Access and SharePoint.[2][6]
According to Forbes, Smartsheet has "a relatively simple" user interface.[2] The interface centers on "smartsheets," which are similar to spreadsheets typically found in Microsoft Excel.[7][8] Each smartsheet can have its rows expanded or collapsed to see individual tasks or large-scale project progress respectively. Tasks can be sorted by deadline, priority or the person assigned to them.[9] If a spreadsheet contains dates, Smartsheet creates a calendar view.[9]
Each row in a smartsheet may have files attached to it, emails stored within it, and a discussion board associated with it.[5][9] When a new smartsheet is created, notifications are pushed out to staff to populate its rows and columns.[10] As information is updated, other smartsheets tracking the same task, project or data-point are updated automatically.[7][8] The service also has alerts for when a task deadline is coming up,[9][11] and keeps track of document versions.[5]
Smartsheet was developed by Smartsheet Inc, in 2005 and introduced to the public in 2006.[12] According to the company's co-founder, Brent Frei, initial adoption was slow because the offering was too difficult to use.[13][14] At the end of its first year, it had 10,000 users.[15] The company began making changes to the SmartSheet in 2008, eventually cutting 60 percent of its features for the purpose of making it more user-friendly.[2][13] Following the 2010 launch of the redesign, the adoption grew to 1 million users at 20,000 organizations by 2012.[13]
Integration with Office 365 and Microsoft Azure were added in 2014.[16] In August of that year, version 2.0 of the Smartsheet iOS app was introduced. The spreadsheet-like user interface, which was part of the web service, was introduced to the iOS app in this version; the developers had not been able to build this feature in the mobile version before.[17] In October 2014, the Account Map tool was introduced, which uses an algorithm to visualize the flow of work across groups of employees.[18][19]
In 2015, Smartsheet started introducing closer integrations with Microsoft Office products, following the changes Microsoft had made in their products to work better with third-party software.[20][21] In January 2015, Smartsheet added support for AzureActive Directory, Microsoft's cloud-baseddirectory service that allowed users to log into products like Excel and Smartsheet with the same login.[21][22] This allowed users to make changes to smartsheets directly from Microsoft Outlook.[20] In 2016, Smartsheet introduced Sights, a configurable dashboard that shows metrics such as how a team is performing against key performance indicators.[4]
In November 2021, McLaren announced a partnership deal with Smartsheet as the team's official technology partner at the 2021 São Paulo Grand Prix.[23]
In 2022, Miro introduced an integration with Smartsheet.[24]
In 2023, Smartsheet was named to Fast Company’s Annual List of "Brands That Matter"[25]
^Quinn, Alexander; Bederson, Benjamin (February 15, 2014), AskSheet: Efficient Human Computation for Decision Making with Spreadsheets, Baltimore, Maryland: CSCW 2014
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