Change Cell Value with Automation Workflow

Umesh Shah · 02/11/25

I have a scenario where three people are providing an update on a project from different aspects, we have 3 fields for each person so the update requests prevent people from overwriting others update. We then would like to concatenate the 3 fields into one. Putting a formula into the field makes it hard to read without exposing the formula.

So I created an automation rule which then updates a cell called "team update" which concatenates the other three fields (update 1, update 2, update 3) into one. I was using {{ }} curly brackets to try to pull in the fields i.e. {{update 1}} in the "team update" column, but the change cell automation doesn't use the {{ }} syntax.

Does anyone know if this is the case and what else I can try?

Courtney S. · 02/11/25

Hi, you might be interested in this help article: Change a cell value with an automated workflow | Smartsheet Learning Center

As far as I know you can't put a formula inside a workflow. If you don't want to have the users look at a cell populated with a formula, you might have to make a column with a concatenation formula anyway, and then use automation to copy the values from that formula column to the visible column.

Umesh Shah · 02/12/25

@Courtney that article is very basic and not at all what I am trying to do. As well, your suggestion to use automation to copy values from a formula column into the visible column doesn't work, if it did I wouldn't have this problem. I wouldn't need a formula column and would just copy from the original columns into the visible one. Unless you can demonstrate how this would work, I am not seeing it due to the limitations in the automation change cell action.