Auto Populate Contact List on Shared Smartsheet

ghansen

Hello-

I am looking for a solution to populate a couple hundred contacts into a Contact List for a shared Smartsheet without adding each contact to the sheet's Contact List manually.

Here is the context:

I have a shared Smartsheet that my team uses for tracking projects. Each project is assigned to a member of my team (all of whom have Smartsheet Licenses) and has multiple project contacts for people in our company who are not on our team. These contacts do not have Smartsheet licenses and the sheet will not be shared with them, but we do need to be able to generate emails to them from the sheet. When populated, our sheet would look something like this:

I've explored the following options:

• Having our admin add these contacts to a Contact Group isn't going to work because these contacts are not users, do not have licenses, and never need to have access to the sheet.

• I found this answered question from June about populating a contact list from a reference sheet, but I don't believe this works for us either since we need to be able to list multiple contacts per cell.

So far the only potential option I see is to have each person on my team populate their personal Smartsheet Contacts with a CSV of our contacts, and then manually manage the contacts by having everyone periodically upload a CSV of additional contacts when we get new staff. This seems like a functionality that's just lacking in Smartsheet so this may have to be the route we take, but I wanted to check if anyone has come up with a solution to a similar problem already.

Any thoughts are appreciated. Thanks!

Lucas Rayala

Hi @ghansen, I believe you can use DataShuttle to populate a list of contacts. Here's a post where an individual did this:

Data Shuttle - Update Dropdowns - Contact List — Smartsheet Community

Otherwise, natively you can't autopopulate a contact list. You could of course do it with the API, but that would require a programmer.

Lucas Rayala

Hi @ghansen, I believe you can use DataShuttle to populate a list of contacts. Here's a post where an individual did this:

Data Shuttle - Update Dropdowns - Contact List — Smartsheet Community

Otherwise, natively you can't autopopulate a contact list. You could of course do it with the API, but that would require a programmer.

Andrée Starå

Hi @ghansen

I hope you're well and safe!

To add to Lucas's excellent advice/answer.

• Here's a help article with instructions.

https://help.smartsheet.com/articles/2482755-dynamic-dropdowns-data-shuttle

Did that work/help?

I hope that helps!

Have a fantastic week & Happy New Year!

Best,

Andrée Starå | Workflow Consultant / CEO @ WORK BOLD

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cnikkih

What would be the answer here if we do not have Data Shuttle and are certain we won't purchase it?