Creating automations from reports

Kristen Christman

It would be super helpful to have the ability to create an automation/workflow from a report so that my team can get ONE comprehensive email/alert each week for a "request for updates" across all sheets that are being pulled into the report.

It can be daunting for a user to receive a similar alert via an automation or workflow (i.e. when a project is in red and needs to be addressed/updated) from individual sheets when they have projects assigned to them on several sheets; they then receive updates on different days, at different times, and then begin to lose track of the update requests.

JPUMBARGER

JPUMBARGER

We notify Employees of tasks they have that are not complete each Monday. Right now, the notification is produced from each project they work on. Some may receive 10 to 15 emails each Monday. We have a report that producing this information as well but grouped by the employee. It would be helpful to be able to set an automation from a report. In this case, the employee would only receive only one notification email listing task to complete on all thier jobs in one email.

Pauline J

Yes!!! THIS! I would love to give this 50 votes — one for each of the different sheets that capture data and need workflow reminders sent; my managers don't need a seperate email for every sheet (and every sheet has different due dates in the rows)…. Even my Maine Coon kitty is begging! Ha! 😊

Pauline J

I have built a really great digital ecosystem to support a major business process at my company. I have many, many sheets that are all the same structure, but house differing departments' data.

I am creating automations — but have run into a challenge:

Do I create separate automations for every sheet, replicating those automations for each of the sheets, or—

Do I create a master sheet using VLOOKUPS to connect to the data from all the sheets, and then I can launch all automations from the single master sheet?

Both are labor-intensive to setup and to update as needed. It would be GREAT to create a report from the separate sheets to only bring in the data that is needed and then put all of the workflows into the report — no need to "massage" the master report, because it would always bring in the right rows from every sheet, no matter how few or many.

If there is an easier way to solve this, I am welcome to the feedback — but I couldn't find anything in the community that related. Thanks!

Kristen Christman

Hi @Pauline J !

I love your thoughts around creating a master sheet that gets populated using something like VLOOKUPS or INDEXMATCH so you could setup automations in one central location. When I thought about it more, though, I think the VLOOKUP or INDEXMATCH formulas wouldn't allow you to have any editable cells in that master sheet since the formulas are locking the cell, reading the info from another location.

I think the opposite could actually work best for you, where you would have all the data from all the sheets migrated to one master sheet (I guess copy/pasting from one to the other?), and then setup Update Request automations so folks don't ever need to go into the Master Sheet to update anything (especially because it now has data from many many departments). Instead, they would be prompted by that Update Request automation to update certain cells via the Update Request Form they'd receive. That way you'd get the updates you needed but you'd only have to create the automation once. Still a lot of initial setup time needed, but could save plenty of time and streamline your processes in the end :)

Pauline J

Hi @Kristen Christman thank you for your thoughts! Having one sheet was an option — but due to the many rows for each sheet, plus our differing delivery dates, etc., for me it seemed easier to manage with separate sheets.

The good news is that the sheets, once setup, don't accumulate — there is a static number of rows. So what I did was to create that master sheet, and cell-link to the individual data. My notifications go out from this aggregated sheet.

After this runs for a while I may change my mind (and probably will) — but Smartsheets give us a lot of options, so I try to remain open to better ways as I go along!

Pauline 😊

Bek T

I love the workflow feature in sheets view, however it'd be great if there was something similar for reports. yes, you can automate an excel or PFD, however a lot of people I work with appreciate the ability to hover over the detail in reports (if there's a lot) plus may need to make changes; whereas if they were sent an auto-update to make changes, it's directing them to the sheet (and not specific data, like in a report). Dynamic view isn't quite cutting it for these purposes - basically an automation where they can get a link to the report (as it's been shared) and then access that way. That would be a huge help!

wadmandudek

Having update requests sent from reports (rather than individual sheets) would be a great feature to implement.

My teams work concurrently across multiple projects/sheets at a time. Is there a way to combine status update requests for tasks across multiple sheets so that they receive a consolidated update request for all projects.

I've created individual reports to pull all the tasks they're assigned to across the portfolio, and considered using the scheduled "send as attachment" option to remind people to comment/update their status notes on a daily basis, but this would be much more UX-friendly as an actual update request.