Does Excel have anything like Smartsheet's Hierarchy (Parent/Child rows)?

[essential]

I just recently tried SmartSheet. It doesn't really do anything for me that Excel doesn't ... except their implementation of Hierarchy with Parent/Child rows. It works exactly how I wish Excel's Grouping worked.

With SmartSheet, if you can make a row a "child row" then it's collapsible under the "parent row" and remains with the parent row, in the order you inputted the data, no matter how you sort the sheet.

In Excel, whenever i've tried Grouping to get something similar, it all goes to hell if I sort rows. The Grouped rows never stay in the correct order independent of the larger sort, and you can't lock them to a parent row. If you want a "parent row" it needs to be part of the group and then disappears when collapsed, and still sorts wrong.

Have I missed any functions/options in Excel that allows this kind of row structure/relationship, something similar to how SmartSheet does it?

Example:
You can input "Child 1-9" under each Parent. If you sort the "Primary Column" the Child Rows stay with the Parent Rows in the order they were inputted.

 

[Jeffrey Mahoney]

I don't know anything about SmartSheet, but I have seen many other applications do something similar.

If you want that kind of functionality, some macros to help you sort the whole table are needed. Like maybe some buttons at the top of each column to allow you to sort a column, but also make sure to sort the parent/child groupings as primary and secondary fields for each column sort. There needs to be a parent name/number in each row of the child rows to help sort. I would make a parent/Child field that was a numbering structure like 1.1, 1.2, 1.3... , 2.1, 2.2... etc.. That field gets sorted a primary and then whatever field you wanted to sort secondarily.

 

[mrguardi]

Curious if you ever got this to work. I submitted a post pretty much asking the same thing.

 

[Edgar_]

You can use a treeview, getting it to work just like you want will be a challenging VBA endeavor and not a part of the excel rows, but it can be done.