Ability to update Smartsheet Templates with Non-Working Days to support year-over-year changes

Kendra Clark

Smartsheet grants Admins the ability to update global settings such as Non-working days however, this setting only applies to new sheets so, if your organization heavily depends on Templates, the settings for non-working days does not apply. Our organization has over 50 reusable templates and some dating back to 2019 therefore each sheet created from a template must undergo a review in order to match the already applied global setting.

If the global setting would apply to templates, we would not only save administrative time but prevent miscommunication around timelines that the user did not know such settings needed to be maintained or missed that they needed to update the sheet settings for non-working day exclusions.

Ref: 05944695: Ability to update Templates with Non-Working Day year-over-year changes

Wizard_Vanessa

Smartsheet currently allows management of a default list of non-working dates, so that newly created sheets automatically get this date list added to their non-working dates. While this is highly useful, it doesn't affect dates in templates or created from copies of sheets.

So what happens when HR changes which holidays we're taking off this year? If a team has specific non-working dates for them based on conferences, retreats, or other non-working dates that affect everyone working on a project? Mass amounts of copy-paste, that's what. And if your team has dozens of sheets that rely on a time-wide list of non-working dates? An hour of two of work. What if they have hundreds of sheets because you're managing dozens of multi-year projects? Dozens of hours of work.

I propose allowing sheets to link to another sheet for their non-working dates (similarly to how we link cell values now). A project manager can then create a master-list of dates in one sheet that they manage, and have all of their project templates link to this sheet. Got multiple teams to manage, all with different dates? Great! Make multiple sheets, one for each team, and give each a curated list of dates. That team's SmartSheets will pull from the appropriate list of non-working dates.

Leadership decides to have an all-company retreat? You can add that date or dates to the master-list for all teams it affects. This will then trickle down in to your linked sheets. No more spending hours copying and pasting the updated dates.

But what about sheets that need additional days added to non-working dates? Either:

• Unlink the dates (which should automatically make its own local copy) and then update the list
• Include a custom date list per-sheet (like we have now) that's additive with the linked list of dates

This second option is the best for initial implementation: the existing per-sheet lists become that sheet's "custom" list. A SmartSheet admin or sheet owner can then link to the master list when it becomes available. The sheets will use a combined filter (Or Filter/Union) when checking against the non-working day list.