Leaving Smartsheet? Your export won’t include the workflows your business depends on

Smartsheet’s exports leave out the features you probably chose it for.

You get the task details—names, assignees, dates and statuses—but lose the formulas, workflows and references that connect your sheets.

Even its separate Business and Enterprise backups, which include sheet data, comments and attachments, exclude formulas, workflows, cross-sheet references, dashboards and reports. They also leave out workspace structure and custom configurations.

These exclusions are listed in Smartsheet’s own backup documentation, which explains that restoring a solution requires rebuilding its items.

The ordinary Excel export has limitations too: working formulas aren’t preserved, and attachments aren’t included.

If you’ve built business processes around those features, downloading your records is only the beginning. You’ll have to recreate the processes in another system.

Moving workflows between different products can require rebuilding anyway. But Smartsheet’s documented backup doesn’t preserve that logic for you to carry across.

Then there’s cancellation.

Immediate cancellation locks your sheets into read-only mode, with deletion following 30 days later, according to Smartsheet’s cancellation instructions.

That gives you a limited window to retrieve your records. Downloaded records can remain available afterwards, but your original setup is already out of action.

Smartsheet also advises giving at least 30 days’ notice before renewal. You need to coordinate the billing deadline, the export and the rebuild.

If you have enough complex processes, realistically, you’ll need to keep running—and paying for—Smartsheet alongside your replacement until the rebuild is complete.