Formula Help: Choosing Most Recent Fields Across Sheets

I’m working with two Smartsheet sheets:

Sheet A: Tracks courses taught (each row has 2 instructors + 2 courses — both instructors taught both courses).
Sheet B: Lists instructors. I want to display the most recent course(s) they taught, pulled from Sheet A.

My challenge: Because Sheet A has two instructor ID columns (Instructor 1 ID + Instructor 2 ID) and two course columns (Course 1 + Course 2), I’m struggling to figure out a formula setup that works across those 4 references.

Has anyone done something similar or have ideas for a formula that could help? Thanks so much!

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Paul Newcome

Are you able to provide some screenshots (with fake data if needed) for context?

Callie Perez

Screenshot 2025-06-20 at 10.02.21 AM.png

Screenshot 2025-06-20 at 10.02.53 AM.png

Absolutely! Here's some sample info! So I need a formula that would pull the date that instructor ID last taught (whether he was in the ID-1 or ID-2 column) and the Courses Last taught (both 1 and 2).

I realize this could be made simpler by combining the two columns into one but old habits die hard, and I'm trying to figure out if I can support the team in a solution with this format that's working for them to track course history before requiring they do it differently.

Paul Newcome

You could use a helper column with a formula to combine the two into one. This leaves the input how they like it but also provides a format you already know how to work with. In fact my suggestion for the easiest route would be creating two helper columns (both multi-select dropdowns) with a formula to join the two columns each together.

=[Course 1]@row + CHAR(10) + [Course 2]@row

=[Instructor 1 ID]@orw + CHAR(10) + [Instructor 2 ID]@row

Then to bring over the date you would use a MAX/COLLECT/HAS along the lines of:

=MAX(COLLECT({Date}, {Instructor Helper}, HAS(@cell, [Instructor ID]@row)))

And to bring the courses over:

=INDEX(COLLECT({Course Helper}, {Instructor Helper}, HAS(@cell, [Instructor ID]@row), {Date}, @cell = [Date Last Taught]@row), 1)

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