How to Migrate from Smartsheet to an All-in-One Work OS

Smartsheet earned its place by giving spreadsheet-fluent teams project management without asking them to abandon the grid. Its formulas, cell linking, and automations let operations and PMO teams run substantial programs, and its familiarity drives adoption where a novel interface would stall. That is a real strength.

The friction teams hit is that Smartsheet is still, at its core, a collection of sheets linked together. Cell links and cross-sheet references are the equivalent of integrations between spreadsheets, and keeping many sheets aligned is manual work. When a team wants connected records, CRM, and reporting that spans the operation rather than individual sheets, a unified work OS is a stronger foundation. The move is less about leaving the grid behind and more about replacing the fragile web of links between grids with genuine relationships.

Classify your sheets by purpose

Smartsheet sheets tend to play distinct roles, and identifying them tells you where each should land in a structured destination.

• Project plans and Gantt sheets become projects with tasks and dependencies.
• Trackers and logs become structured records with custom fields.
• Intake sheets fed by forms become intake workflows.
• Rollup or dashboard sheets become reports rather than stored sheets.

Export sheets and untangle the links

Smartsheet exports sheets to Excel and CSV and provides API access for fuller data. The critical work is untangling cell links and cross-sheet references, which are the connective tissue holding your workspace together. Document every cross-sheet reference before exporting so you know which values are stored and which are pulled from elsewhere. This map of dependencies also tells you the order to migrate in, because a sheet that others reference must arrive before the sheets that point to it.

During import, turn cross-sheet references into genuine relationships between records, and turn rollup sheets into reports. Map Smartsheet users to destination accounts, preserve dates and dependencies for project sheets, and pilot one program before migrating everything. This is also the moment to retire the many one-off sheets that accumulate in any Smartsheet workspace. Reconcile row counts against the source after each import, since attachments and comments on rows are easy to lose in a plain export and worth confirming explicitly.

Rebuild formulas and automations as workflow

Smartsheet's formulas and automated workflows are where a lot of hidden logic lives. A column formula that calculates a health status, an automation that sends an approval request when a value changes, a conditional format that flags overdue rows, these encode rules your team depends on without thinking about them. Catalog each formula and automation and describe what it accomplishes, then decide whether it becomes a computed field, an automation, or a report in the destination.

Migration is the moment to consolidate this logic rather than copy it. Sheets accumulate near-duplicate formulas that drifted apart over time, and a fresh build lets you standardize on one correct version. Rebuild only the rules that still matter, and let the destination's native workflow handle approvals and notifications that Smartsheet implemented as bespoke automations, so you maintain less custom logic going forward.

Keep the grid, gain the model

Teams fear losing the spreadsheet familiarity that made Smartsheet work. A good destination keeps a grid or table view, so people who think in rows and columns stay comfortable, while the data underneath becomes connected records rather than linked sheets.

Atlas offers table views on top of a shared data model, so your Smartsheet grids become structured records that connect to projects, CRM, contracts, and analytics without cell links to maintain. See /all-in-one for the full surface and /pricing to pilot on the free tier before moving your programs across.