How do I set up reoccuring events in Smartsheet? (Weekly/Monthly Meetings)

Jordan_Lentz

Hello, I am trying to build a large and complex calendar for my organization's operating rhythms as well as meetings, to help increase visibility across our organization. Toggling between the calendar view and grid view, I have the grid view labeled by meeting, frequency, day, time, length, start date, and end date. Toggling between the grid view and calendar view, I can see each event is scheduled on the calendar, however, is there a way to replicate this for repeating events. Some meetings occur monthly (every second Tuesday of the month) while others occur on a weekly basis (every Friday). Is there a way to have the calendar show an event that occurs at the same time every week without making a new event for it in the grid view. Would it be able to populate an event that occurs every second Tuesday, even though the dates change? Looking to have this be a high-level calendar where all meetings and events are visible for the team for the rest of the year. Thanks so much!

Brian_Richardson

You can do this with two sheets.

Setup the first one with your events and an automation that copies the event to a second sheet based on a trigger. You'll need to figure out how to set helper columns with the dates that you want to trigger the next recurring task to occur.

The second sheet then has an automation that copies or moves the event right back to the originating sheet, which will create the event again on your first sheet but with updated dates. You'll need a column that calculates the "next" trigger date in the second sheet. That date will copy to the same named column in the first sheet.

This works to persist an event/task that recurs regularly. If however you're looking to generate multiple copies of a task all at once…that is trickier. You can setup a "count" field on the first sheet that has the number of tasks that you need, and a second "created" field that counts the number of repeated rows already created, and a third field for "remaining copies" that subtracts the two. Then have an automation trigger when the remaining copies changes and is >0. That automation copies the row to the intermediary sheet which copies it back as discussed above. The automation will stop when the "remaining copies" reaches 0.

The other way I've solved that is using Bridge and the Bridge Javascript module to piece together rows to add to the sheet based on the criteria. You can be much more advanced here with lots of criteria and various rules. You could do something similar with a 3rd party integration tool and/or using the SDK.

If you search community for this scenario, there are other ways people have solved this issue… and I'd also suggest submit an enhancement request (or look for requests for recurring tasks and vote them up).