How can I view all comments from a curated group of rows?

Meredith Rhodes

Here is my scenario: the regulatory staff on my team are transitioning to a smartsheet-based tracker to keep track of all regulatory tasks related to a clinical trial.

Each task (initial applications, protocol amendments, personnel changes, continuing reviews, etc) has its own row. In other words, one trial may have 10 to 100 different regulatory tasks / rows represented.

If there are 25 comments over 25 different rows that are associated with the same trial - is there a way that I can curate all of those comments into a report?

Thanks for any ideas.

Meredith

Paul Newcome

You would need to have a column on the source sheet that has the trial on every row. Then you can create a row report to pull in rows where trial is "XYZ", and the comments should be there in the report.

Meredith Rhodes

I can certainly filter out the rows for one study - but is there a way to read all of the comments without clicking through every conversation? I would like to see them all as text fields in a cell - not just the latest comments.

Paul Newcome

You would need to leverage the API, the premium add-on Bridge, or some other similar third party app such as Zapier to get the comments to populate the sheet.

Meredith Rhodes

I have made a latest comment column - it's not perfect - but it'll probably show most of the comments in text form on the report...

Andrée Starå

Hi @Meredith Rhodes

I hope you're well and safe!

To add to Paul's excellent advice/answer.

You could use the Latest Column feature, and as long you have a trial id or similar, you could combine it with a so-called helper sheet and a Workflow that would copy each comment to that sheet, and then you can either collect them back to the main sheet or use a report to show them grouped by trial.

Make sense?

Would that work/help?

I hope that helps!

Be safe, and have a fantastic week!

Best,

Andrée Starå | Workflow Consultant / CEO @ WORK BOLD

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Meredith Rhodes

Thanks Andree!

Yes - I think I get what you're saying - to capture each latest comment and move it over to another sheet for an archive of comments. Can I trigger this workflow when a new comment is added?

Paul Newcome

@Meredith Rhodes You would set it to trigger whenever the Latest Comment column changes.

Meredith Rhodes

Thank you @Paul Newcome and @Andrée Starå - this is very helpful.

Andrée Starå

@Meredith Rhodes

Excellent!

Happy to help!

Yes, you'd set the trigger to be when the latest column changes.

Something like this.

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Paul Newcome

Happy to help. 👍️