Clean up formula building experience

Brian_Richardson

I would LOVE to see a significant enhancement to the experience of building formulas. Formulas are the single most common area of confusion, and the first "step" of any builder toward enabling automation and leveraging Smartsheet.

Therefore, the formula builder could use some help to take it from "just as bad as excel, all in one cell" to "amazing and easy-to-use formula builder!"

Formulas should be able to be written down like code, broken out onto multiple lines at the writer's discretion onto whatever lines makes sense within the cell for easier reading. Builder box should auto-indent arguments.

Taking the formula from this mess:

=IF(OR(ISBLANK([Assigned To]@row), ISBLANK([Expected Hours of Work]@row)), "", SUM(COLLECT([Daily Hours]:[Daily Hours], [Assigned To]:[Assigned To], [Assigned To]@row, Start:Start, <=Finish@row, Finish:Finish, >=Start@row)))

To this easier-to-follow format:

=IF(
      OR( 
            ISBLANK([Assigned To]@row), 
            ISBLANK([Expected Hours of Work]@row) 
      ),
      "", 
      SUM(COLLECT([Daily Hours]:[Daily Hours], 
            [Assigned To]:[Assigned To], [Assigned To]@row, 
            Start:Start, <=Finish@row, 
            Finish:Finish, >=Start@row
            ) 
      ) 
)

When someone hits = in a cell, the text entry area could immediately reformat to a building box that would accept Enters, Tabs, Spaces to reformat the formulas without changing their functionality.

Additionally, this should open up options for dynamic error correction in formulas, much like code editors show red highlights when the formula as-written has a problem like a missing argument, a missing closing parenthesis, a function name that doesn't exist or is misspelled, an extra comma, and more very common issues that are nearly impossible to find in a long single string formula.

AWentz

100% agree!!!!! Just started using Smartsheet and was surprised to find that the formula 'box' was just that, a tiny little box where you would struggle to write complex formulas. I imagine there is much time wasted by end-users when writing and/or troubleshooting formulas because of the 'tiny little formula box'. Such a primitive feature and is sub-standard in today's environments.