Central Location for User Comments across Smartsheet

My team uses a mix of sheets, reports, and WorkApps every day. Having ONE place to see all of my comments across Smartsheet would be extremely helpful to reference and track progress of my work.

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Project Management

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Comments

Meredith Rhodes

I agree @Tiffany R!

I have seen workarounds that collect and track the latest comments from one sheet to another - but I really like the conversations feature - I would love to be able to set up conversations in one sheet (where there may be multiple instances of the unique identifier) to post to conversations in another (where there is only 1 instance of the unique identifier).

Scenario:
Sheet A = the master database, each row is a unique clinical trial, conversations used extensively to communicate within team about trial
Sheet B = set up to organize protocol amendments for trials on Sheet A - there may be more than one amendment for a trial in any given time interval (right now I've hidden the conversation feature on Sheet B - because I want people to curate all information in conversations on Sheet A)

I would love a way to send conversations from Sheet B to A to make our process more intuitive.

Thank you for considering this!

jmyzk_cloudsmart_jp

Hi @Meredith Rhodes

I created a demo solution based on your scenario.

https://app.smartsheet.com/b/publish?EQBCT=c7de18da4d5e4cf395bc2d28ef44202d (The published demo sheet is editable; you can test this solution by adding a new comment)

The basic method is: When a new comment is added in Sheet A → "Latest Comment" updates → Record the Comment Date → Copy the row to Sheet B.

In Sheet B, a formula combines the Comment Date and Latest Comment (Comment Date + ": " + Latest Comment) to easily track when each comment was made.

In Sheet A, we use a JOIN(COLLECT()) function to retrieve the comment history based on the Trial ID, combining all related comments with their dates. I used Sheet Summary Fields and a Show Comment History checkbox to keep the sheet clean, so only the selected row displays the history at a time.

Concept

Each clinical trial (Trial ID) has a unique row in Sheet A (the master sheet). Sheet B records amendments or conversation records related to these trials, where multiple rows can share the same Trial ID.

Automation Workflow

When New Comment Added
- Trigger: When a row is added or changed AND "Latest Comment" changes to any value.
- Action: Record the current date in the "Comment Date" column.
When Comment Date is Today
- Trigger: When a row is added or changed AND "Comment Date" changes to any value.
- Action: Copy the row to Sheet B (Comment Record Sheet) and then clear the Comment Date.

Note: We avoid using the system "Created" column because copying rows with system columns can break the automation.Clearing the "Comment Date" after copying ensures multiple comments made on the same day are handled properly.

Displaying Comment History in Sheet A

Add a checkbox column ("Show Comment History") to decide which Trial ID’s history to show.
In the "Comment History" field, pull related comments from Sheet B using:

=JOIN(COLLECT({Date & Comment}, {Trial_ID}, IFERROR(INDEX(COLLECT([Trial ID]:[Trial ID], [Show Comment History]:[Show Comment History], true), 1), "")), CHAR(10))

Only the first selected checkbox will be active, making the sheet easy to navigate without cluttering the view.

Also use:

=IF([Show Comment History]@row, [Comment History]#)

to control visibility so that only the selected row’s comment history is displayed.

https://app.smartsheet.com/b/publish?EQBCT=12157ccce978407ba1e638a3b8fd4945

Until Smartsheet introduces an official feature for a central location for user comments across sheets (as Tiffany suggested here), this approach can serve as a workaround.

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