Using Smartsheet to book meeting rooms

Dear community

Has anyone used Smartsheet as a calendar for meeting rooms or other spaces. The principle is basically the same as outlook.

The basic concept is pretty straight forward and that I managed to implement with a form, calendar, etc. The challenge obviously comes when you want to have advanced features such as recurring meetings. Recurring could be every day, once a week, first or last day, etc. The challenge I see is how to create multiple rows in a sheet once a recurring request is made.

In my mind I would need to perform some kind of loop to repeat the creation of records for a number of times, and then apply some rules to determine which day should be done.

Any advice on how this could be done, would be appreciated.

Regards

Answers

  • Zachary Hall
    Zachary Hall ✭✭✭✭✭✭

    This is an interesting concept. The easiest way is probably to automatically generate the dates in separate columns and have those added to the calendar as well.

    • Use a checkbox on the form for recurring
    • A drop down to determine daily or weekly
    • Add a "final meeting date" field on the form
    • Calculate the number of occurrences by subtracting the original meeting date from the final meeting date (divide by 7 if weekly)
    • Fill in the dates in the extra columns for the number of occurrences

    There are a lot of different variables, like if people want bi-weekly or monthly meetings, how many instances of the meeting they want to schedule at one time, etc. But that is one way.

    The more complicated way would be to set up automations. Automations can't create a new row on the sheet you are working on, but you might be able to send a copy to another sheet and then have that sheet change dates and send a copy back a number of times, changing the date and a countdown variable each time in a loop.

    Best,

    Zach Hall

    Training Delivery Manager / Charter Communications

  • JBG
    JBG ✭✭✭

    Hi Zachary,

    Thank you for your response. Those are two interesting solutions, which i will definitely dive into.

    I will let you know once I have managed to accomplished my effort in creating the recurring requests.

    I also came across this article. https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/110493/create-multiple-multiple-rows-of-data-using-a-variable-number-from-another-sheet

    Hannes Greyling

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