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Most dashboards default to reports because that’s what Smartsheet makes easy out of the box. Reports pull data, widgets display it. But as the workspace grows, this approach creates two issues. First, maintenance scales linearly. Every new metric means a new report with its own filters, configuration, and potential breakpoint. A dashboard with 15 metrics depends on 15 separate reports, and any one of them can silently fail. Second, reports can’t be calculated.

There's a bug hiding in almost every Smartsheet dashboard that uses date-based calculations, and most people don't even know it's there. It doesn't throw an error. It doesn't show a warning. It just silently feeds your dashboard the wrong numbers. The problem is the TODAY() formula.

Most Smartsheet dashboards start the same way. Someone builds a few reports, points some chart widgets at them, and calls it done. It works until the workspace grows. Then the reports multiply, the widgets start breaking, and every small change turns into a maintenance project. The issue isn't skill. It's architecture. There's a better way to structure your Smartsheet dashboards that makes them faster to build, easier to maintain, and reliable at scale. I call it the three-l

Why Your Smartsheet Dashboard Keeps Breaking (And How to Fix It). The solution isn't more reports. It's a fundamentally different approach to how data flows from your sheets to your dashboard. To accomplish this, we propose you utilize a three-layer architecture that eliminates most of these problems: Layer 1: Source Sheet (The Foundation). Layer 2: Metric Sheet (The Formula Engine). Layer 3: Dashboard (The Visualization Layer).