Having 'Fun' the Smartsheet Cross Sheet References, again.

BullandKhmer

So I've set of a project template, comprising a project schedule and project cost tracking.

In the project cost tracking solution there is a budget & cost tracking sheet, an invoices sheet and a cost variations sheet. The budget & cost tracking sheet pulls data from the other two. There are 8 cross sheet references in the sheet, four to the invoice sheet and four to the variations sheet.

When I 'save as new' the project template the four cross sheet references to the invoice sheet vanish, into this air, for no good reason that I can see. They are no longer in the reference manager, the cells that use them show as INVALID REF# and multiple other cells show up as BLOCKED# as they reference the cells that use the cross sheet references.

This renders the whole solution as completely useless. Its pretty hard to track costs when you cant reference an invoices sheet.

However, the four references to the variations sheet remain in place.

Can anyone offer a reasonable explanation why this might be happening, and possibly a solution. It does seem that this should just work, but doesn't. This is the third significant error I have had in a couple of weeks relating to Smartsheet cross sheet references not functioning 'as expected'. Is anyone experiencing similar issues?

BullandKhmer

Actually, I looked this up and other have experienced similar issues. I then tested what they did and it worked!

It seems if you are setting up a template folder with cross sheet references, you want to be sure that the sheet that they are referencing contains some data (any data) as when you copy the template, if there is no data in the source sheet the cross sheet references will not copy over. This kind of makes sense, kind of.

I simply added a placeholder column, wrote 'placeholder' in it and hid the column, that did the job.