Automation being triggered whenever anything in my row changes, not just the field I specified?

Hi there,

I am having trouble with an automation workflow in Smartsheet, and I am not sure why it is happening. I had this same workflow set up on a different sheet (an older version of our database) and it worked just fine. I'm driving myself crazy trying to figure out why it's not working now.

Basically the automation says that whenever a row on the sheet changes AND when the field "Discovery Call Assignee" changes, it should notify the "Discovery Call Assignee" that they have been assigned to the row item. What's happening is, anytime any piece of data in the row changes, it's sending a new notification to the "Discovery Call Assignee" even though that field hasn't changed. Here's a screenshot of the automation. Can anyone tell me why this is happening? (I'm only showing the top part of the workflow to protect private information, but these are all of the conditions I have set up).

Thanks a million!

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Erin Horiuchi Green

Hello @Olivia D. ,

Your Trigger block appears different than mine.

My Trigger block uses the contact column "SME". Anytime the "SME" column changes changes to any of the contact options, then the notification triggers.

Have you tried selecting all contact options for Discovery Call Assignee?

Then you can slim down your conditional paths

Olivia D.

Hi Erin,

Thanks so much for your response. I also realized I did not have the column set up with specific contacts, so I've since gone in and changed that.

However, if I select the field "Discovery Call Assignee" in the trigger block, it won't let me select the contacts from the list. The only option it automatically defaults to is "changes"; I'm not getting any option to select who it changes to.

Screenshot 2025-02-26 at 11.54.28 AM.png

I've tried deleting the "when" condition and adding it again, but as soon as I select "Discovery Call Assignee" it just defaults to "Changes" without the ability to add any other logic :(

Erin Horiuchi Green

Hello @Olivia D. ,

Can you please change your Trigger to "When rows are added or changed"?

Does this then allow you to select the Contacts in the "Discovery Call Assignee"?

Olivia D.

Hi Erin,

I tried changing it to "when rows are added or changed" and it still only gives me the option "When Discovery Call Assignee changes".

I did attempt to get around this by adding to the names of the discovery call assignees to the condition block below, instead of using "Discovery call assignee is not blank", I used "Discovery call assigee is one of (person x, person y). etc. However, it is still doing the same thing. I went in to update the status - completely unrelated to the discovery call assignee field - and it immediately sent a notification to the discovery call assignee (luckily in this case, it was me) even though that field didn't change, the status had changed. So I will go back and turn off the automation so it doesn't keep pinging someone any time anything in the row changes….

Thanks for looking into this ! I will continue to dig and try to figure out why it's doing this as it seems nothing we've tried has worked so far.

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