How to Use SmartSuite Views + 3 Expert Tips

When you're inside your SmartSuite account, have you noticed up in the top left hand corner there's this view area where you can add different layouts and visual effects to the information that you're organizing in SmartSuite, this kind of area is called your View Types area. And if you're like most of the hundreds of clients we work with here at ProcessDriven, you're probably in a situation where you know these features exist. But figuring out how to use them for your exact use case has been a bit of a challenge. Maybe all of the gadgets and gizmos have been a little intimidating, or maybe you've just been using the default views and not thought, hmm, how can I customize them to my use case in this video? I'm hoping we can solve that. And that's why today I wanted to make this video talking all about views in SmartSuite, what they are, when to use them, why to use them. Oh, and plus I will be sharing three pro tips along the way. You'll be able to find all of these, as well as our affiliate link for today's sponsor, SmartSuite, inside the description below. If you'd like to do an act of kindness today, please do use those links in the description below. They support this channel at no cost to you, and I would really appreciate it. All right, back to the video. To do all of that, I figured it'd be best to start us off with a story based on a not so distant reality. Let's imagine that you have a team of four people. One for each major function of the business. Means you have one person for sales, one person for marketing, one person for fulfillment.

Don't forget, forgive me as head of operations.

Right? So you have a team of four. But the problem is each of those four people need to work together in that one SmartSuite account. But they need to see information in different ways. Your marketing team might need to see stuff by marketing campaign, while your fulfillment team might want to see all of their work by client. And your sales team, they want to see everything based on the pipeline someone is in. Everybody has the different perspective that they want to see.

Bro. Bro. Does this mean we need to create like separate things for our whole team? Like a solution for this, an app for that, and every single person like has their own solution.

That would be an excellent solution, particularly if you have a more sophisticated team of say, 30 or more people. However, for lean teams, teams that don't have a lot of team members who need to work together very closely this may not be the perfect solution. One way I like to think about this is to think about your digital workspace as like an office party. Let's say you want to have your team of 10 over for an office party. Would you have them in 10 different rooms or one room? Yeah, usually. The answer is pretty simple. You wouldn't want to have each person alone in a room and call it a party. In the same way, when you're building out your work management software, it's rarely a good idea to build a ton of different solutions and have everybody all spread out to make SmartSuite feel like the hub of your business, to feel like the place to be the thing, to check the notifications that matter. You want to have people interacting and to do that usually at first, at least, it's really helpful to have fewer solutions, fewer apps, and have people closer together so they're actually able to collaborate and seeing each other's efforts. So before we start adding new solutions and new apps and spreading things out more and more, it's important that we take advantage of the features that are right at our fingertips inside the solution that we already have. For example, let's just say our team is already operating with this task Manager template from SmartSuite, which you can get by signing up for SmartSuite using our affiliate link below. And when you install that template, you're going to see a simple task manager just like this. If our main goal is to allow different people to see work in different ways, or we don't need to necessarily go beyond this structure in order to make that happen, all we need to do is use the views.

Wait, so how would this work exactly?

I'm glad you asked. Well, here's some basic info to know. Views live under this menu here, and they come in two categories, public and private. A private view means a view only you have access to, and a public is shared with anyone who has access to this area, we can create new views by clicking on the plus in either section. Once we do, we're going to see a bunch of different options appear to us. Now, while it looks like these are all different view types, and they are, I find it helpful to think about these in four categories, which I'm going to go through with you here. The first category view is everything between grid and map. That whole section is what I would call a record view. It's a type of view that allows you to see your records in different layouts. To show you some examples of those, we have a grid view, a card view, a Kanban view, a calendar view, a timeline view, and a map view. Assuming you had an address in your area, all of this first section just changes the layout and look of the information you already have. It's an aesthetic layer you can add on, but it's not changing any of your underlying data. For example, if I were to go to a card view and look at my data and click on a record, it looks the exact same. Same. If I have this view laid out as a grid view and click on a record, it looks the same. The only thing that's changing is the visual look of the view. That's our first category. The second category view is what I'm going to call a reporting view that includes charts and dashboards. These reporting views allow us to see our information in a report. Imagine that for example. Here you can see the blank dashboard we have where we can add different widgets to report on our information. This dashboard allows us to put a lot of charts all together, whereas a chart view allows us to just have a chart that we're focused in on and nothing else. Whether you want a super powerful focus chart or whether you want a dashboard that mixes and matches charts and other information, both dashboard views and chart views are reporting views. In my view, that's a lot of views. That is our second section, though our third section is just forms all by itself. Form is a unique view type in that it allows you to input information only when you go to a form view. Despite what the name says, it doesn't allow you to view your information. This doesn't show all my records. This doesn't show my data. What the heck is this? Well, this form view allows you to input information only. Think of it as an on ramp, or an entrance or a greeter at the door. You can create new records through this by dragging fields or onto your form and then having people fill them in. By sharing this form with others here you can see an example of what that form might look like. But the form view itself is not showing you your records. It's an input area only. With the exception of combining linked records on these forms, which is a bit of an advanced tip here. Forms are really just input only. They don't allow you to see your information in the same way the other view types do. This is input view. Forms is our third category now our final category. Our fourth one here is what I'm just going to call an organizational view. That's what this folder is. All it does is allow you to group your views into groups. I know shocking you never would have guessed that by the name. The folders allow you to do things like client views and then drag and drop any views you want to think of as only for clients into that area. Now, it's important to know that these folders are purely for your own peace of mind. They don't have security or permissions attached to them. They are just containers to help you keep things a little bit prettier inside your SmartSuite account. However, this kind of organizational structure is our fourth type of view we have. Bruh.

Okay, but you know, thing is, for me, I want to see all the things like everything that people are doing, I want to see all of it in one spot.

What we want to do is create a view for each of the perspectives we want to have. For our case, it might be each hat we wear or each department we want to focus on. To do that, we're going to go up here and we're going to create a new view. We're going to be looking at our first category of views here because we do want to see our records in different ways. So in this case, you can just choose whichever view type best suits your brain. In this first category for me, I think that's going to be probably the Kanban. I think that'll be nice. And I'm going to name this view the perspective it's coming from. In this case, maybe it is just sales department. I'm going to keep this view public and then click Create View. Once I do that, I see my view type change to a Kanban view and by default it has everything's broken out by assignee. Now I'm actually going to change this out to have things grouped by status instead to look a little bit more familiar. But all I've done so far is just show me all of the tasks in a different view. This isn't showing me just the sales department. So what I'm going to want to do is add a field to allow me to filter and sort. So I'm going to open up any record on here, it doesn't matter which one. And I'm going to add a field for breaking things down by department. I could use the tag field that's already here, but that has its own purpose. So I'm going to create a brand new one by scrolling down to the bottom, clicking Add new field and I'm going to do a multi select field. The reason I'm doing that is because some projects theoretically could be in multiple departments. I'm going to add all four of my values here. And if I wanted to, I could change the styling for them. For example, maybe I just want color. Sure, why not? And I'm not going to allow people to create new choices. I don't want new departments coming from scratch. And I do want to require an entry. Once I add that field here, we'll see it pop up at the bottom of this record right here. Oops. And I realize, let me go back in here, I forgot to give it a name. Let's give it a name of department. Once I have this field added, I'm going to fill in the value. So for example, if this is for sales, I'm going to add sales. Sales. I'm going to do this for every single one of these data deduplication. That sounds like an operations thing to me. Add that in and repeat this for every single record to make my life a little bit easier. While I go through and check all these, I'm going to make sure that that field is showing at least for now. So I'm going to look for department, add that field to the display and look now we can see this below each column. I'm going to repeat this for all of Once they're all added, I'm ready to add yet another setting on here. In this case, a filter. I want to filter this down so it's only showing me things where the department has any of meaning. It contains the word sales. So it's okay if it's sales and marketing or sales and operations. I just want to make sure that whatever I'm including includes sales in it. And that's the only stuff I'm showing in here. Here we can see now filtering to only show things that include sales. We have just two tasks inside our sales area. Now I can choose to remove the field display of department. Since they're all sales, there's no reason to highlight this. And I might want to highlight a different field such as the assignee or anything else I need to know to make sure that these tasks get done on time.

So is there a way to like focus in on just stuff that's about to miss the time deadlines? Because like as the project manager of the company, like I need to see that stuff.

Yeah, actually you can definitely do that. What you're going to want to do for you with your operations hat on is you probably want some kind of view that shows you all information. You don't want to just see sales or just see marketing. For you, you want to see everything. So in this case, assuming we don't already have a view that shows us everything, we're going to create a new view again and again. We want to show something with the records. So we're going to be looking in that first section. So if Timeline view is your favorite, we're going to go in here, click Timeline. We're going to call this All Tasks at Risk because that's the title that matches the intention here and create this view. And that brings me to my first pro tip of the video. When it comes to creating views in SmartSuite, it is important and maybe a bit trite for me to remind you to name your views clearly. Okay? Having a view named Tasks isn't that helpful. Having a view named allurgent and important tasks, now that is helpful and it lets me know what I'm seeing. The thing we don't want to get into the habit of is these vague view names that tell us nothing or worse still, make us assume things. If I see a view called Tasks, I'm going to assume that's every task I ever had. But if you actually have some kind of sneaky filter, that means that view is only showing me space. Some tasks. And I think it's all the tasks. Well, I might think I'm totally good while you think I'm totally slacking. Not having that clarity of knowing what I'm looking at can be a real problem. So make sure when you're naming your views or giving them descriptions, you are abundantly clear. And in this case, we're going to set a spotlight that says when the due date is in the past 365 days, make it red, yell at us, shout at us, let us know. And we're going to add a second one that is a yellow spotlight that says, hey, when the due date is today and the status is not blocked, on hold or complete, let's make that yellow to get our attention, saying, hey, this one's at risk. We don't know what's going on with this, but it's not looking like it's going to get done today. As an additional layer of a spotlight here, these two different spotlights will add the color red or orange yellow based on these values. If I switch to month view, you can actually see some of these older tasks here and all of them haven't been done and they're all showing up as red because this is now overdue. If we change this rule so maybe we wanted it to be green instead, you'll see they'll all change to green. That's because these spotlights are like conditional formatting inside Excel. They'll highlight things based on the logic we set up inside the Spotlight settings. Bruh.

This seems like a lot to look through.

You know, it can feel like a lot at first, but I think as you start using SmartSuite more and more, you'll come to find that there's a few views that you'll reference all of the time and the rest of them you're just going to never touch. And my suggestion is to lean in into that. You don't need 50 different views that you're looking at for most people, and whatever those views are, just add them into your start item so they show up on your sidebar and jump to them anytime you need them so you don't have to browse around SmartSuite to find the different perspectives. If you have one starred view for tasks and one starred view for schedule and one starred view for sales, then you can easily jump to the sections you need and not be browsing through all of the possible options every time. I think if you're constantly browsing all of the SmartSuite views and apps and solutions and so on and so forth, it's just going to become overwhelming and that's really not our goal. At the end of the day, we want you to be able to have quick links to jump to what you need in SmartSuite so you don't have to go browsing around. Pro tip number two here. Make sure you're using color sparingly. As you can see inside this layout, just adding the color of green and red can really make these ideas pop. Particularly if we had hundreds of tasks in here and they were all different colors. But as soon as we start adding 3, 4, 5, 10, 20 colors, the impact of the color gets diluted. If we have every color in the rainbow, the red color may not stand out as much. Whereas if most of our tasks did not have a color and most of our fields were plain, when we did use color, it would have a bigger impact on the viewer and make it more eye catching. So as you're adding emojis into fields or colors onto values, make sure you use them slightly sparingly and use color where you want emphasis, and not just because it's a pretty color. So just to go back to our original question here, to make sure that we have each of our departments broken out and to avoid all the extra work of having to create different solutions for each person, all we want to do is create different views that filter things down based on the values. So in this case, I've already created one for sales. I'm going to now duplicate this view and add one for marketing. And I might even change the layout if marketing prefers a different layout of view. And I'm going to change the filter to look for marketing instead of sales. When I'm done, my tasks will be added in there. And now we've got a marketing department view all within the same tasks area that every other team is using. I can make this view private or share it with everybody, so that way everybody can take advantage of this marketing focus. Third pro tip for you here. When you are creating these views, if you are creating a view that is truly just for you, use the private views. I think most people kind of go to an extreme on this. They always share their views or they never share their views. And neither is good. We want to make sure that if we have a view that would be useful to other people, it's there for them. But at the same time, if you have a view that makes sense to your little weird brain and would just confuse everybody else, please make it private. Avoid the confusion and the clutter and the extra clicks by having everybody see every little creation you have. Show them what they need to see. Show them what you've created that you're proud of and ready to share. But anything that's a work in progress or just made for your brain, keep it as a private view. You can even add a description for folks who are kind of a little bit confused navigating their way around as to what this view means. For example, like that, and have that show up when people are looking at this record. And that way when people hover over the view, it explains to them what this view is actually doing. And once I have each of these department views set set up, every department can customize this. They can change the view style. They can change which fields show up on their record based on what they like to see. They can sort their records by different things like alphabetical or episode number or client id. They can filter things down even further. They can group them by different pieces of information, such as maybe the due date is what they want to see overdue versus due today versus due tomorrow. Or maybe they want to see things broken out by assignee. They can add those same spotlights we talked about before, change the actual card sizes for each of the respective views so they can zoom in or out. And if they want to share this view with outside stakeholders, for example, maybe the marketing team wants to share this with their outsourced video editor. They can share this view and send this link to their contractor. That will allow that external party to see the information they need to see, or as much as it or a limited amount of it without having to actually come into our SmartSuite account.

Dude, this totally blows our spreadsheets out of the water.

All of these settings are baked right into these view features and don't require us adding more SmartSuite templates or learning more fancy features. All we need to do is leverage the views that are already there to allow our people to see information in the way that matches how their brain works while keeping everybody in the same party. So that way collaboration is really easy to do. That way you can spend less time wondering which of the 45 solutions should I create this task in? And instead just create the task in your one source of truth solution and focus your energy on actually getting the work done rather than organizing the work. Imagine that bruh.

And if you enjoyed this video, smash that like button dude. It costs you. Nothing supports this channel. It's a no brainer.

Oh, and a quick reminder, if you want to follow along with what we did in this video, build out your own task management structure with cool views by department. Use the link in the description below. By using our affiliate link, you support this channel at no cost to you and to continue on your SmartSuite journey. In the meantime, check out this video here where you can learn about how to ditch spreadsheets and replace them as SmartSuite. Or check out the description below where you can learn about how to work with us here at ProcessDriven to get your SmartSuite built out and ultimately systemize your operations. Thanks so much for watching and until next time, enjoy the process.