How can I make an approver's view on the message notification field mandatory?

Shirley Romero

Making it mandatory will not allow approver to approve or decline without acknowledgement. Example creating a column that would say: "You acknowledged that accounting details have been reviewed?" Then enters initials. This has to be done prior to clicking approved or decline.

Paul Newcome

This cannot be set up through an Approval Automation. At his point you have a few options (each of which has its pros and cons).

You can just include a blurb that says that they are acknowledging by submitting within the Approval automation.

You can set up an update request automation as a reminder that they need to enter their initials if they submit but didn't the first time.

The last option I can think of that would truly make it required is a bit complex but possible. The first step is to create an "approval sheet". This sheet will have the same fields in it that you need to send in the approval request and a form created to match.

You would then take the base form URL and drop it into a formula on the original sheet that allows you to basically generate a custom form on each row that will have the row data prefilled when someone clicks on the URL in that row. Since you can make form fields required, this will give you the ability to require their acknowledgement prior to them submitting their approval.

Send this custom form URL through an alert and instruct the users to click the link to open the approval form.

The form entry would populate the "approval sheet", but you can use formulas with cross sheet references to pull the appropriate data back over to your original sheet.

If that last option sounds like something you would be interested in, fell free to let me know, and I will try to pull together a few links to help you get started building the formula.

Paul Newcome

This cannot be set up through an Approval Automation. At his point you have a few options (each of which has its pros and cons).

You can just include a blurb that says that they are acknowledging by submitting within the Approval automation.

You can set up an update request automation as a reminder that they need to enter their initials if they submit but didn't the first time.

The last option I can think of that would truly make it required is a bit complex but possible. The first step is to create an "approval sheet". This sheet will have the same fields in it that you need to send in the approval request and a form created to match.

You would then take the base form URL and drop it into a formula on the original sheet that allows you to basically generate a custom form on each row that will have the row data prefilled when someone clicks on the URL in that row. Since you can make form fields required, this will give you the ability to require their acknowledgement prior to them submitting their approval.

Send this custom form URL through an alert and instruct the users to click the link to open the approval form.

The form entry would populate the "approval sheet", but you can use formulas with cross sheet references to pull the appropriate data back over to your original sheet.

If that last option sounds like something you would be interested in, fell free to let me know, and I will try to pull together a few links to help you get started building the formula.

Shirley Romero

Thanks Paul. I would like to explore the possibility of the last option. Please provide me then links to help build the formula. I appreciate all your help.

Paul Newcome

Here is the help article:

If you have multiple characters that need replaced, you can use the SUBSITTUTE function to replace all of them at once instead fo trying to do each one individually (it will make more sense after reading the help article).

="form_url?" + SUBSTITUTE("Field Name 1=" + [Field Name 1]@row + "&Field Name 2=" + [Field Name 2]@row, " ", "%20")

https://help.smartsheet.com/articles/2478871-url-query-string-form-default-values