Autonumbering limitation

Jeff Chamberlain

I have a column in my sheet named "case number" which is an AutoNumber. For my use case, I will occasionally need to escalate a case to another department and I need to create a reference number compatible with their system, lets call it a "XYZ number". I would like to check a box and have this number generated, i.e. XYZ-0001, XYZ-0002, etc for each time I escalate.

Note, not all cases are escalated, and created a value off the case number isn't really logical. So is it me, or is it a horrible design flaw that each sheet is limited to a single AutoNumber? What kind of work arounds has this group done to maybe get something like this going?

Samuel Mueller

@Jeff Chamberlain It would be nice if there were additional auto number columns, you should definitely suggest that as a new idea. What I would do in this situation, is copy the row to a different sheet with a different autonumber setup, then reference the new autonumber back to the original sheet with cross sheet references and an index match formula.

Jeff Chamberlain

I appreciate the insight, but unfortunately that is a bit too complicated for this use. I would then have to add another sheet to reference both sheets. Seems like a powerful tool like SmartSheet should take a clue from Excel and allow for something like this.

Samuel Mueller

Fair enough. It would be a pretty straightforward solution to set up, but yes you would need to add a couple references to the new sheet to bring back the new autonumber value.