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Good Morning,

I have a dashboard that displays information for a morning meeting, it is all numbers, percentages and charts. I have had no problem with it up until now, I have been asked to add a comment function. Where the meeting head can click, then type a comment to display onto the dashboard before he prints it and goes to the meeting. I created another sheet, then used a form linked to the comment box to give him his easy input.


Where my trouble is, I cannot get the formulas to play nice with the sentence. They work swimmingly for numbers all day. Ive tried a bunch of different ways, but I am still learning Smart sheet so it has been eluding me. My code on the sheet that feeds the dashboard works and feels solid, this is it below.


=IF([12/16 Update 3]17 = [12/16 Update 3]10, "1", "0")

I use this to check the dates, paired with this.

=IF([12/16 Update 2]17 = "1", [Display Comment]4, "Date Mismatch")

Then I have a final check for errors before displaying

=IFERROR([Display Comment]2, "No Comment")


I just cannot seem to get smartsheet to gather the sentence, I need it to gather only the newest sentence, and to not display an old one because there has been no new input. My current attempts are to automate row removal based off of date on the separate comment sheet, to ensure that the sheet stays almost empty, so that the references can be tied to row 2.

It works in theory, and that's barely. It cannot handle two comments in one day for starters, and sometimes smart sheet will start a new row at row three and leave row two blank to vex me. Its crude, and I am unhappy with it, but my attempts to improve it have not had success.

I would love some advice so that I can be done with this comment situation, the answer feels just out of reach that it is driving me crazy.


Thanks,

Tom

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Best Answers

  • Community Champion
    Answer ✓

    @tlabeau Just for context, your comment is a column in a sheet, not a comment/conversation per the SmartSheet vernacular?

    If I got that right, then you want to allow someone to submit a form (which is one column only?) and have the contents of that submission show on a dashboard. ((Cool idea ... I may have to use it! ))

    If you are already using a form to collect the comment, I would build a report to catch the latest row from the sheet and use a report widget to display that on the dashboard. To ensure the report sees only the latest comment, build a formula on the sheet that calculates a maximum value that the report filters on. (I use two columns: one that inserts an auto number that increments for the new row, and then a column with this formula: =IF([Row ID]@row = MAX([Row ID]:[Row ID]), 1, 0) to return a one for the latest row)

    With this approach, you also getting a running log of the comments.

    dm

  • Community Champion
    Answer ✓

    @Dale Murphy I personally like metrics widgets better than forms, so I use a Sheet Summary field in a similar way.

    =INDEX(Comment:Comment, MAX([Auto-Number]:[Auto-Number]))


    As long as ALL entries are via form populating at the bottom of the sheet and not being sorted/deleted, then you can just use the MAX function for the row # portion of the INDEX function.

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