Contact Field in Index Match Returning Strange Values

Misty Antonacci

I have a project plan template that is created through the control center. The owner of certain tasks is dependent on what department the project is in. I have a background sheet that is a task owner crosswalk, and then on the project plan it will run an index / match to pull the correct owner.

This has been working fine for months, but recently I've been running into an odd error I've never seen before. When the plan is made the contacts pull in as a string of numbers and then the name in quotes. It then doesn't update to an actual text field until I open the sheet.

This is causing me issues because a notification goes out to certain task owners when it's created, but with that field not populating correctly it's not sending. Also, most updates to these plans are done from reports, not the plan template itself, so no one is opening it in the first few days to refresh the field.

This is only occurring on fields that have that crosswalk to the department - certain tasks in the plan always have the same owner, but they still refence that crosswalk sheet just so the contact field could be a column formula. Screenshots below show the cell history of an example of the issue on a crosswalk field, and then an example of it working on a single owner fields.

Has anyone else run into something similar?

[the no match error when it is first created is normal, expected until the department field populates]

Paul Newcome

You may want to reach out to support for this one. That looks like an array that is coming from the back-end but shouldn't actually populate on the front end.