If cell is blank copy value from other column in same row?

cbsarge

I have a form our Sales team uses for customer interactions. I'm trying to work around the inability of Smartsheet to copy only specific cells from one sheet to specific cells in another sheet. I thought if my workflow copies the columns from the source sheet with the form attached to it to the destination sheet and then write formulas in that sheet to show the data from one of the copied columns in the EXISTING column if it's not empty. I could then hide the "new" columns. I was thinking something like the below formula might work but, it's producing a #CIRCULAR REFERENCE....

=IF(NOT(ISBLANK([Customer Name]@row)), "", ([Account Name]@row))

Does anyone know if this is possible and if so, how I might write the formula? The 2 columns I'm working with for this test are "Customer Name" (existing column) and "Account Name" (copied column from sheet with form).

Thanks!

Zachary Hall

If I understand your scenario correctly, the column that exists in the TO sheet (and not in the FROM sheet) will always be empty. When you use automation to copy/move a row from one sheet to another, it will always generate a new row on the sheet it is being copied/moved to. By default any information not coming from the FROM sheet will be blank.

If you wanted to be able to manually fill out the [Customer Name] column in the TO sheet you could have a formula in another column that takes [Customer Name]@row if it is manually filled out and [Account Name]@row if not, but since it has to be filled out manually that is a bit redundant.

I hope this helps!

cbsarge

The existing TO sheet already has a lot of rows in it so I was thinking if I could convert [Customer Name] to a formula column and only pull the data from the [Account Name] column if [Customer Name] were empty. This would preserve the existing data and only start copying the new rows that get added. After some experimentation it doesn't seem like that's possible. I can create new columns for the data being added [Customer Name NEW] and use a formula like =IF(NOT(ISBLANK([Account Name]@row)), [Account Name]@row, [Customer Name]@row) but, that would require rewriting a bunch of reports and I'm not sure I want to go down that path...

🤔😑😫