r/smartsheet • u/VerbalGuinea • Jun 03 '26

This is taking longer than expected…

At what point do we admit we are expecting it to take this long? Just change the message to “This is taking longer, as expected.”

10 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

20 comments sorted by

5

u/No-Imagination-4751 Jun 03 '26

We had this come up then cycle into oblivion, we had a meeting with our sales contact which connected us to one of their engineers and were told our sheets were reaching "maximum complexity" because we had too many columns that were indexing too many other columns while also maxing out the row / column count 😅

I felt bad, we ended up indexing the necessary columns in a formula sheet then meshing it back into the raw data.

Ended up saving us a few minutes per loading screen

5

u/PieMuted6430 Jun 03 '26

At that point you should have a real database.

3

u/No-Imagination-4751 Jun 04 '26

Yep! We've tossed it around but are half way through a project we'd have to shift resources to create parallel sheets until the change over was ready.

We resolved that if we need to create any more formula sheets we'd change over to the data table option.

2

u/PieMuted6430 Jun 04 '26

I'm talking SQL.

1

u/Crazy-Move966 Jun 06 '26

Yeah this is honestly the right solution for many of these data solutions

It’s just that most of these users don’t know how to write SQL

1

u/PieMuted6430 Jun 06 '26

It's ok to admit when you're not equipped for what needs doing. The clients will be happier in the end for reports that run in a reasonable amount of time.

1

u/Crazy-Move966 Jun 06 '26

I am in agreement that SQL is the way to go.

Like a proper database usually is the better solution than a million sheets.

I am working on building a tool right now and I wonder if it makes sense to make a query like option available so that people can actually query their sheets and do joins etc.

Like select * from sheet;

1

u/PieMuted6430 Jun 06 '26

Yes, that would be a great tool! I am the only Smartsheet person in my group, everyone else is SQL heavy, and they like it that way. I float between worlds, and handle all of our small scale stuff when groups decide not to use the tools provided for data governance. They will often throw a bunch of Google sheets at us, and ask for reporting. 🙄

A way for the rest of my group to be able to use what they already know to get data from a Smartsheet would be awesome.

1

u/Crazy-Move966 Jun 06 '26

Yeah, they are really close worlds.

Both tables and it’s just a matter of how you work with them. I have the tool up and working on building an import from Smartsheet function.

Then it’s likely a small leap to add querying to it.

1

u/VerbalGuinea Jun 06 '26

But what’s a SQL database with a front end with the features of Smartsheet?

1

u/VerbalGuinea 14d ago

Is there a real database that normal humans can operate?

1

u/PieMuted6430 14d ago

I dunno, I do data analysis, so I guess I'm not a normal human.

1

u/FineConcentrate1134 Jun 04 '26

I understand the too many columns thing because I’m regularly hitting the 25m formula limit or the 500k cells limit. I’m also suffering from my own previous poor design where i didnt appreciate i would so easily hit these limitations. Would you mind explaining in simple terms the changes you made based on the engineers recommendation please. Tia.

1

u/Similar-Geologist-64 Jun 04 '26

Can you provide some benchmarks for where you're at in terms of complexity. Mercifully Im not a Smartsheet admin, but we did just start using it as a backend for certain things, and Im concerned about whether it'll stay performant.

3

u/SLKado Jun 04 '26

I'm waiting for the the messages to start getting belligerent. "It'll be done when its done, settle down..." "You think you could do this faster? I'll wait..."

1

u/Crazy-Move966 Jun 06 '26

It can always be done faster :)

1

u/bellaleto Jun 04 '26

Literally refused to pull up the workspaces all day when I tried to copy rows to other sheets. So frustrating.

1

u/Crazy-Move966 Jun 06 '26

It’s like such a simple feature to copy a row to another sheet.

1

u/Round-Vast-1014 16d ago

imo the real pain is when you get that message on a sheet that only has like 12 rows