Freezing Dates

Eternation

I am looking to have a blank cell populate a date in a column using an if statement to check for specific values in another column.

With excel I would normally use a circular reference to check if(and()) the cell was blank and that the values I want are in another column, and then populate a today(). With Smartsheet it calls out my bad practice circular reference.

Is there a way to have the cell update with the date and then freeze that date without using a circular reference?

PCG Sam Harwart

Hi @Eternation,

A couple of ideas:

=IF(ISBLANK([Date Column]@row), TODAY(), [Date Column]@row)

This would set the destination cell to be either the date in the [Date Column] or today's date.

If you need to "freeze" the date to be today's date, but then lock that in, you could use a Sheet Summary value in the formula instead. You can use summary values in your formulas by referencing them as "[Value Name]#".

Would either of those options work?

Cheers,

Sam

—

primeconsulting.com

Eternation

Would you be able to clarify summary value for me? The initial solution is my standard go-to with excel. It is a circular reference, however, and smartsheets is returning an circular reference error in return.

Eternation

To clarify and close this out. I am an idiot. What ultimately solves this problem for me is a workflow to add the date whenever the specified cells meet the criteria I want to use to trigger the date. I, essentially, wound up using the workflow triggers as an IF function in the same way I would have written it, but without needing to write it as a function. I've brought too much of an excel mindset into this and had been overlooking some of the power involved with using the workflows.