Split Contacts Past 20 Into a Separate Column

bdow

Hi,

I have a form that is filled out to send a notification to a group of staff. The person creating the message fills out the form and pastes the list of email addresses (separated by semicolons) from another source to populate a Contact List column and automation sends a notification and reminders to the staff on that list. The problem we are encountering is that the list of staff is occasionally more than 20 addresses and, in that case, Smartsheet seems to treat the column as simple text due to the limit on the number of contacts in a cell and no notifications are sent. This system was created by a previous person in my position and is in use, so I am hoping to work within what we have at least for now. Either it had been working for more than 20 contacts in the past or no one noticed that it wasn't.

My thought on a solution was to create a couple of new columns that take the email addresses in groups of 20 (i.e. the first 20 in Contacts 1 and the next 20 in Contacts 2) so that I have two valid contact lists and can send the notifications to both. I'm just not sure how to write that formula and my attempts so far haven't been successful.

I'm open to better approaches to the problem too of course.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Paul Newcome

There is no way to use a formula to make this happen. You would need to use the API access, the premium add-on Bridge (might work but unsure), or a third party application such as Zapier (might work but not sure).

The easiest fix would be to instruct your users to not add more than 20 contacts into a single field and provide multiple fields on the form.