Never say never: There might be a way

One of the things I enjoy about reading and answering questions on the Smartsheet Community forum is that every once in a while there is general consensus that something can’t be done. Some of these are like brain teasers to me. I think about them for a while, I mull them over, I come back to them later.

Sometimes, I even solve them.

There’s a even smaller subset of those that the answer just seems to leap off the page, even before I finish reading all of the arguments of why it can’t be done.

The (paraphrased) question was “can a blank row be added to a Report?” In Smartsheet, a Report is a view of data in one or more Sheets based on certain criteria. Rightly so, a blank row is not one of those selectable criteria.

But it can be done without too much effort by thinking a bit about how Reports work – they have selectable criteria and they can be configured to show only the columns of interest.

If the columns of interest are blank and the selectable criteria columns are not, then the data will be retrieved for the Report, but will appear blank.

Appearances are often a good substitute for reality.

Here’s a Report without those blanks:

And a subset of the data with blank rows.

Just because the answer may not be obvious at first, does not mean there isn’t one.

There might be a solution to the problems that are troubling you.