Advanced Dashboard Logic - Taking Advantage of TRUE/FALSE WBS Properties

The line item data from the Estimate View is essentially "exported" to the Dashboard view within the Estimator program. When that data is populated on the $$_____$$ Sheets, there are some formatting "corner cases" that you run into. The vast majority of the data responds as expected to standard Excel logic, but the TRUE/FALSE WBS type can be a bit tricky.

When you try to use the "True" value as a criteria in your SUMIFS, the logic essentially reads like the example below:

=SUMIFS(...... , ..... ,'$$LineItems$$'!BP:BP, "True")

It’s very likely that didn’t work as you’d expect. The TRUE/FALSE WBS column is presenting as text, but it doesn't respond as expected. If you just type True without the quotes, the formula attempts to reformat that word to TRUE as the Boolean function within Excel. Which, as you might imagine, doesn't work because the BP column doesn't show Boolean functions either.

Where does that leave us? We simply have to outsmart Excel logic and formatting that are attempting to be overly-helpful. 

The * symbol serves as a wildcard symbol in excel, and it is our ticket to success! 

=SUMIFS( _____ , _____ ,'$$LineItems$$'!BP:BP,"=T*")

It's that simple! Basically, we say, regardless of formatting, if this cell's value starts with T, we want that included. It works like a charm. 

There is one more step we can take to make sure that future updates to the toolkit don't break the link in this dashboard. We'll include a second option for the Boolean version of TRUE. While this looks trickier, think of it as running two SUMIFS in the same cell at the same time - literally, the SUM of two SUMIFS.

SUM(SUMIFS( ________, ___________, '$$LineItems$$'!BP:BP,{"=T*", TRUE}))

Paste that formula into your cell and you'll have the results you were looking for.