Data quality issue: List tasks assigned to 'unregistered' users

Peter Woods

I want to resolve two issues; prevent people from exacerbating the existing issue and rectifying the legacy DQ issue

1) How do i prevent users assigning tasks to people who are not registered in Smartsheet? Is there a way of forcing them to select from the drop down list?

2) Whats the best way to audit all tasks assigned to 'unregistered' users so we can go through and clean them up

Thanks

Peter

6STEP | Rohann

Hello Peter,

I have a couple of suggestions for you.

 

1) I would set up a contacts list with your registered users in a contacts column.  There is a checkbox to restrict to list values only.  You can check this when you set up and Contacts Column.  I think only the Admin or sheet owner can bypass this function at their will.  Users will be stuck with making a selection from the list only.

2) Once you have done this, you should be able to set up a filter to filter our everyone on your new Contacts column, thus showing everyone else.  Either that or you could use reports in the same way as the filter on the sheet.  You can set the report to show erroneous contact data and ignore data associated to your new approved contacts list.

 

Hope this helps.

J. Craig Williams

Peter,

I would expand on Rohann's #2 and create a Report to look at all sheets in the account.

This is a bit more cumbersome than previously because of a change to Smartsheet in the  April 2017. You will want to select all Workspaces one by one and the Sheets folder for the Where? condition.

Next, in the Who? criteria, select all of the valid names and select "Exclude selected items"

Anything that shows up will be an invalid assignment.

This will also point to the sheets where the assignment column needs to be changed to use the valid entries.

If you have a significant number of sheets to correct, I might consider doing it via the API in a one-off application.

I hope this helps.

Craig