Importing Emails of Users, Smartsheet Not Converting to Contact First and Last Name

Dylan T

Hello! Has anyone figured out a way to load a column of emails or names, any combination really, into a contact column on a sheet where the user's first and last name appears rather than just the user's email? We're working on a large list that will be a source table for numerous systems and I want to user's contact to display rather than just their email.

We're utilizing an Excel sheet at the moment but eventually thinking of shifting to DataShuttle to sync our HR roster to this lookup list, so the value format from Excel will be imported or updated in Smartsheet regularly. Right now, the only way I know to fix this is to go into each cell and either add the user's first and last name to the email, essentially creating their contact, or re-typing the user's first and last name and overwriting the email that I've imported.

Any thoughts or workarounds would be much appreciated. Thanks!

Courtney S.

To set up the contacts column in the first place to have names, I use the workaround mentioned in this similar post: Contact List Dropdown - Adding multiple contacts to the list at once — Smartsheet Community

You tell Smartsheet the contacts column type is a Dropdown, copy-paste a bunch of contacts as dropdown options using the format Firstname Lastname <email@here.com> and save, and then you go back to the column properties and change the column type to a contact list. It should convert all the dropdown options into proper contacts with both the name and email fields completed. As more people get involved later, you'll want to go into column properties and add a full contact entry (email and name fields) for anyone new you want to use in the columns. Then, as you're entering emails into new rows, when you start entering an email you should get the complete contact suggested.

Unfortunately I'm not totally sure how to fix the issue of already having a bunch of rows with only emails entered. Once you have complete contacts entered into the column properties list, you could at least speed up the manual replacement a little by filtering the column for each incomplete contact, to replace all the cells with the same email with the complete contact version at the same time.