Conditional Formating based on recent changes

Gkoukakis

Hello!

I tried to find if it is already covered with no success.

Highlighting tool is very useful, but has some limitations.

The case is the following:

We are using Smartsheet project sheets to manage our Product Developments. Very often, our PMs have to run some scenarios to test how certain changes affect the project & portfolio itself. For that, they save the project sheet as new and they run some changes. Those changes and all the affected cells, need to be checked by the RnD Manager. So usually, the PM makes the changes to the copy and then shares it with the Manager. Unfortunately, the highlighter tool will not work, because the manager will access the sheet after the changes and there will be no highlight.

One bypass is to ask the Manager to open and close the file immediately after creating the copy, but this is not effective. The other option is to ask the Manager to check the Modified column or even short by this column. However, again is not as effective as the highlighter tool. The same with creating a changes log sheet.

Hence, I am trying to find if there is any way to use conditional formating instead to highlight the rows (if not the cells) that were changed after creating the copy. But, due to the Smartsheet issue with time stamps, it is quite hard. I have created a helper column to get the time from the Modified column, but I cannot use it in Conditional Formating Rules (requests a Date comparison).

Is there are any thoughts?

Many thanks

George

Lucas Rayala

Hi @Gkoukakis -- you can set the highlighter to show for longer periods of time. You don't have to use the 1-hour default. Would it help if you just sent the highlighter to a week? You can always create a workflow to note if a cell has changed, but you basically need a workflow and a corresponding column to mark the change. It's fine if you have a few columns, but if you have a lot, it gets cumbersom.