Auto-Create Child Rows WITHOUT Bridge or API

Paul Newcome

Happy to help. 👍️

Lucas Rayala

I'm glad you wrote this down! I did this for a project a while back and then kind of forgot how 😂

jprovo227

@Paul Newcome thank you so much for this solution!

I'm having trouble maintaining the original auto numbering in the working sheet despite the column in the Working Sheet having a different label than the auto numbering field in the form sheet.

I find that this process isn't repeatable until I figure out the auto numbering issue since each subsequent submission continues to have the same Auto Number, so it is no longer auto-numbering when using this form entry function.

Currently in the working sheet, the auto numbering feature allows me to have unique IDs per parent row for counting/reporting purposes.

Form sheet:

Working sheet:

ser72

Hi Paul:

I have this mostly working, but running into a small issue. As in your example, I have A1, A2, A3, but they are all in the sheet at the same time and I need to add the child to each of them. The formula looking at MAX Auto-Number gets me A3 only as MAX Auto-Number =3. How can this be modified to get this to work for all A1, A2, A3 sequentially when they are all in the sheet at the same time?

For instance, my sheet looks exactly like this:

With the Auto-Number - 1, 2, 3 respectively. I need, exactly what your output is:

Instead I get only A3 and it's children.

Thanks in advance

Paul Newcome

@ser72 This solution is designed for submission of new rows through a form or some other way to restrict them from being created to one at a time.

beckyb27

A more complicated use case question. I was able to use this for two different sheets. In one of the sheets I have in a column that gets checked if the task in that row is blank (some projects will have more tasks than others) with an automation, and then moving the blank cells to a helper sheet through automation, and moving the rest of the populated rows to the main sheet so there are no blank rows in the final product. That seems to works great.

I am trying to do the same sort of thing with my second sheet however, this chart needs to be used in the calendar view so I have added in some text to the beginning of each task cell (cells in white) to identify which Project the task belongs to using this formula (that works!)

=[Project/ Phase/Task]1 + "-" + INDEX([Task Survey 1]:[Task Survey 1], MATCH(MAX([Auto-Number]:[Auto-Number]), [Auto-Number]:[Auto-Number], 0)) equals this: TESTING 123-Discussion about Objectives with OIG

However I'm struggling with adding in a "if blank" check column- because of the =[Project/ Phase/Task]1 + "-" at the beginning of the formula still populates even if the task is blank, so there's nothing that is completely blank being pulled in from the form data. The attempted automations don't work and I cannot find a formula that might be used to check off a box if the task is blank.