How to Delete Old Sheets in Smartsheet

Delete or archive one sheet

For a sheet you have already made your mind up about:

1. Open the sheet and choose File → Delete, or right-click the sheet where it is listed and choose Delete.
2. Deleting needs Owner or Admin permission on the sheet — Editors, Commenters and Viewers cannot delete it, so for those you have to ask somebody who can.
3. Deleted sheets go to Deleted Items in the Browse panel and can be restored for 30 days, after which they are gone for good. Worth knowing before you delete somebody else’s sheet as an Admin: only the owner can restore it.
4. Not sure enough to delete? Move the sheet into an archive folder or workspace instead — it keeps its history, links and references intact while getting out of everyone’s way.

Why the old ones are so hard to find

Browsing shows you names, not dates. The normal Browse view gives you no way to sort or filter your sheets by when they were last changed — a System Admin on Business or Enterprise can pull a Sheet Access report that lists the last-modified date of every item, but it is a static emailed export, not a live view. So the sheets most in need of a clear-out are exactly the ones you never open and therefore never see.

It also helps to separate two kinds of old. A sheet whose last-modified date still equals its created date was made once and never touched again — a stray copy, a failed import, a template nobody adopted — and is the most likely candidate to clear out, once the checks below come back clean. A sheet that was worked on hard and then went quiet is different: that is often a finished project, and finished is not the same as disposable.

Check these before you delete

A sheet with no edits for a year can still be feeding something live. Before removing one, check whether a report or dashboard gathers rows from it, whether another sheet points at it with a cross-sheet reference or formula, and whether any automation still runs on it — our Workflow Inventory answers that last one across your sheets (for the single-step rules the API returns).

One more worth checking on anything that once went outside the company: whether the sheet is still published to a public URL. Deleting it takes the link down with it, but an old sheet that is both forgotten and publicly readable is worth knowing about either way.

List every sheet nobody has touched

Our Stale Sheet Finder does the finding part in one pass: every sheet you can reach, ranked by how long it has sat untouched, with your access level on each row so you can filter to the ones you can actually delete. Drag the threshold from a month to five years to re-cut the list instantly, then export it as CSV. It is read-only — it tells you what looks dead, and the deleting stays a deliberate act you perform in Smartsheet.

Frequently asked questions