How to change a legal name associated with an email?

TerrieG633

I've got a user who changed her name legal first name last year and Smartsheets will not allow me to edit the name in the contacts. Even though I've removed it from my auto-fill and contacts list this old attribution is stuck. I assume it's because she's cached somewhere in our old Smartsheet lists. Is there a way to force the change? She gets quite upset whenever the old name populates some automation. I have tried the pencil edit button & If I add her by email address I can't change it at all, If I add her by new name, as soon as I add the email address it picks up the old name. The email address has not changed, just the first legal name. Our organization changed it in LDAP last year so if I removed it from my Outlook cache, you'd think I could remove the old one from Smartsheet. My work around has been to target automations to ONLY the email address manually applied and address those automations to her as "Dear So & So," but this has been a problem for contact list specific workflow.

Ray Lindstrom

There's a couple things I do when this happens.

Have the user click on the lower-left corner of their Smartsheet window (their account icon), and click Personal Settings. In their Personal Settings page, they need to update their first and last name.

After they have done that I go to a cell where there name is populated (or any cell really), and I start typing. I click "Add new" for a new address book entry. I then enter the new full name along with the existing email address.

After doing these two things, the user's name then appears correctly for me. It doesn't update all the places where that user's name is already listed with the previous name. Those can be replaced with a new entry if desired.

Best of luck to you!

-Ray

TerrieG633

Ray,

Thanks for the quick response. Unfortunately she doesn't have an account so I'm not sure this will work for me. She's the recipient of notifications only and while I could have her sign in to see if the preferences could be changed, I'm guessing I'd have to link her to the sheets temporarily to verify the data was linked...? She's not the type to work with me in that way, so I'm trying to avoid it if possible. I've been wanting to using a master contact sheet to link to these fields instead so maybe that's how I work around the problem. Right now, It's picking up every address I've ever emailed.

Terrie

TerrieG633

I have found a solution that works for me. If you use the addresses Smartsheet pulls up from your personal contact list and they do not have a name associated with them, you cannot pull up the email and edit it by adding the Preferred Name (it only recognizes the previous name). You can do it with these steps:

1. Select "Edit Column Properties" in your contact column
2. Manually type into the field the Preferred Name ONLY
3. Click Ok
4. Select "Edit Column Properties" in your contact column again
5. Select the pencil adjacent to the Preferred Name you created under Step 2
6. Add the email to the Preferred Name
7. Click Ok
8. Save the sheet

This seems to override the inherent contact list.

Terrie

Ray Lindstrom

Awesome, glad you got it figured out, and thanks for sharing!