Autofill a value

KathyG

Hi. I'm new at building formulas in Smartsheet. I have a numeric column that I want to autofill a 1 if no value is entered. Can someone help me with this? 

Mike Wilday

Hi, Kathy, Could you provide some details about your implementation? Will people be submitting information via a webform? Will be people be using a report to view and fill in information? The reason I ask is that there are a variety of ways this could be accomplished. Getting a better perspective for the workflow will help us users suggest options to meet your needs. 

KathyG

Thanks for your reply. Some users will submit with the webform, which I can default to 1. The users on my team though will be entering directly into the sheet, and that is where I want an empty cell to autofill/default to 1. 

It's for a web update request form. Our default is that each line item includes one update, but there are times when one request includes updates to multiple pages. We want to track that. 

Thanks very much for your time.

 

Mike Wilday

I did some testing and was able to create a formula that could provide what you are suggesting but Smartsheet's auto-fill functionality that will apply the formula to new rows breaks when a form submission is submitted - which overwrites the formula. There might be a workaround for this issue, but I am not aware of one. Perhaps Craig can suggest one. Could you require that all users on your team also submit through the webform? And then update on the sheets themselves? That could resolve your need.

J. Craig Williams

KathyG,

I'm not picturing it.

New rows are created from the Form by some users and not others? One method is to create a separate form for the users that need to enter different sets of data or to address why they are entering the data directly.

Another is to provide a formula driven column and a user entered column. For example, I have a task date that is calculated automatically from the info that user submits in the Form. However, on review, they (or their manager) may want to tweak that date, so in the sheet (but not the Form, though it could be there too, I suppose), there is a Date Override field. The Actual Date is another column that looks to the Override if it exists or the calculated date if the Override is blank.

Same concept may solve your problem.

I hope this helps.

Craig