Automating Daily Change Detection and CSV Export in Smartsheet

Mustafa Ahmed

Hello Smartsheet Community!

I hope you're all doing well. I'm currently exploring ways to automate a specific workflow in Smartsheet and wanted to seek your expertise to understand if this is possible.

Here's what I'm aiming to achieve:

1. Automated Daily Change Detection: Is it possible to set up an automated process in Smartsheet to trigger once a day and check if any changes have been made to the sheets? Essentially, I want to monitor for any modifications to the data within the sheets.
2. Automated CSV Export: Can I automate the process of exporting the content of a sheet as a CSV file? It would be highly convenient if I could receive a CSV file of the sheet's content via email or another method as the result of this automation.
3. Integration of both, Ideally, I'd like to connect the first two points mentioned above. In other words, I'd like to automate the daily change detection and have it trigger the export of a CSV file if changes are detected. Is this achievable within Smartsheet?

Additionally, if any of these functionalities are not directly supported within Smartsheet, I'd like to know if there are workarounds or if leveraging the Smartsheet API might be the solution.

I greatly appreciate any insights, guidance, or tips you can provide regarding these requirements. Your expertise is invaluable, and I look forward to learning from your experiences.

Thank you in advance!

SolutionSal

Hi Mustafa,

1. This functionality is indeed supported. To implement, navigate to the sheet where you'd like to track changes, click "Automation" in top left corner, click "Create workflow from template", select "Alert someone when anything changes"
2. This functionality is supported through Smartsheet's advanced capability, Data Shuttle. This is a powerful tool for uploading/offloading data from Smartsheet. However it is an additional purchase. An alternative to Data Shuttle could be to configure a Report with your sheet as the source sheet, include all columns or only most relevant, then you could configure a filter to include rows where Modified Date is in the last 1 day or set no filter to include all rows. Then click "File" in top left corner of Report, click "Send as Attachment", set a recurring delivery schedule. The sheet contents will be attached as an Excel file. Here is the relevant help article.

Hopefully this provides you with most of what you're looking for.

Best,

Sal