Preventing Modified by and Modified when rows have formulas

sdkotes12901

Hello!

All my sheets have automation (formulas). I am having difficulties keeping track of who has modified records.

We do not have access to sheet history because we are on the Team Plan only.

This is a huge problem because we have issues with managers not updating project status on a timely basis. I have no recourse.

Help! If there is a solution, I would really appreciate any help. 

Thank you,

Sandy

P.S. If there is already a community post, I apologize for the redundancy.

Benjamin Walker

Sandy,

 

Do the 'Cell History' or 'Highlight Changes' features help out here? All plans have access to these features!

 

 

Ben

sdkotes12901

@Ben Walker:

Thank you, Ben. The cell history does work. I did forget about this option.

However, if I want to do reporting on modified by / on. I would not be able to .

I appreciate your input.

 

Brad Jones

Sandy,

You can create a report based on Modified and Modified By system columns even if you are on a Team Plan.  We are, and I have dozens.  I don't think you even need to add the Modified column to your sheets, but we did just in case.

The thing you have to be careful of is that Smartsheet only looks at the most recent date stamp for the modified column - and does NOT look at the various changes made to the sheet across the period.

Let me give an example:

You have a report built to show you changes on a certain sheet, based upon the Modified system column.  For this example we are looking at changes to the same row+cell each day:

On Monday, Bob changes the value to 4

On Wednesday, Sarah changes the value to 7

On Friday, you change the value to 9

Now, if you run a report and say "show me changes where Modified=Wednesday" you will not get any results.  This is because the Smartsheet reports don't actually look at when the cell was changed - they only look at the last date stamp in the Modified system column.  So, even though there was a change on Wednesday, and you ask it to show you changes that happened on Wednesday, you will not get results because the last change was on Friday and Friday<>Wednesday

 

Another thing to be careful of.  When you run a Report in SS - it will only show you results for modifications in your report if a cell was directly modified on that row during the time period specified.  So, comments and attachments don't trigger the Modified column to be updated.  So if a person makes a comment but no cells in that row were changed, then the report will not show you that row when you run.

 

The reports are pretty cool in SS for sharing sheets with a little more control, but they are not comprehensive and therefore not 100% accurate.

sdkotes12901

Brad:

I am behind on following up in the SS community. Thank you for taking the time to share your experience with me. I wish we had the activity log. 

I would love to have the team plan include dashboards and activity log. 

 

Sandy

J. Craig Williams

Further to what Brad said (and well said it was - I will add that to my standard setup)

You could have PDF of the day's activities sent via email from the Report. 

I've also used Zapier to capture new Comment threads and replies to existing comments (but not edits) and new Attachments (but not changes) and populate a cell to indicate latest comment and count of attachments added so if either of those were important to the log, they are available.

Craig