Pivot App is not recognizing the Contact Columns

Gajapathi Muniyappa

We had a lot of pivot tables built from Contact columns but all were showing blank now, when I test manually by creating a new pivots I see contacts columns were not recognizing in the pivot apps, all summaries were grouped under the Blank row.

Here is my example eCOA Implementation PM is a contact column and have lot of values but If I run the pivot, I'm getting just <BLANK>. Any suggestions here?

Kerry St. Thomas

Look at the structure of your Contact column - check the "Allow Multiple Contacts" toggle… turn it on if it's off, then rerun your pivot. This creates its own issue in that your sheet changes somewhat in functionality, so you might want to do this testing and if this is the solution, create a helper column of type Contact with column formula =[eCOA Implementer]@row… or make that same helper column type Text/Number.

Pivot and Contact columns tend to behave strangely - ESPECIALLY if your contacts are synced with Microsoft Azure - changes to the Directory are outside Smartsheet's capacity to control, so you have to kind of wing it like this and get creative.

Good luck!

Gajapathi Muniyappa

Hi Thomas, Thank you for the response but unfortunately as it is our main tracker and we have more than 10 contact columns and all were need to calculate summaries via pivot table.

We have entering the contacts manually with in the sheets itself and all were valid contacts. (We are not importing from outside).

After multiple testing I see error getting only when,

1. Contact column activated multiple Contacts for a cell and
2. Pivot Table build from a report (It is working fine when pivot is built directly into sheet)

These pivots we were built 3 years ago, it was working fine until last week and suddenly now Contact column values were not recognizing for Multi Select and Pivot built from a report.

A fix to the issue from the smartsheet would be a great help.

#PivotError, #MultiSelectContact, #PivotfromReport

Kerry St. Thomas

Interestingly, this problem surfaced with some things our own systems had built. The solution we tried was a combination of the suggestions I offered above, all kind of lumped into one. The fix was to change the Contact type columns into type Text, run the pivots, then change them back to type Contact and run again.

I suggest giving that a try on one of your columns to see the result - and depending on the outcome, file a ticket. Good luck!

Gajapathi Muniyappa

Thank you for the suggestion. Unfortunately, Pivot is not recognizing the values when we change MultiSelect contact column type to Text and even change it back to Multi Select column. I still see the same error.

Source:

Target

Pivot Configuration