User-Friendly Workaround for collaboration in Table

E.Lengermann

BLUF: Is there an end user-friendly way to pull a table with questions listed in the first column (static) into Smartsheet for collaboration?

Business need: each product must be evaluated against a checklist to ensure compliance criteria are met across multiple categories. internal team completes the evaluation checklist per product (1:1 relationship), then a POC creates a summary of responses (word converted to pdf) and uploads to an internal compliance management system (TrueVault)

There are a set list of questions (one per row) and columns capture responses (columns apply to all questions). One evaluation form per product.

ex checklist:

Checklist Item	Yes/No/N.A	Evidence	Mitigation Steps
Eval Question 1
Eval Question 2

Ask: Does anyone have ideas how I might take this checklist out of excel and incorporate into Smartsheet in any capacity? I'd like to avoid having the information "trapped" in excel vs displayed without opening an individual file.

I know forms can't handle a 1:many row entry so doesn't support tables, but not sure if someone has a creative workaround that priorities user friendliness for folks completing the evaluation.

Adrien Leduc

I think there could be 2 ways of doing it. 1. with report or 2. with control center. This 2nd one involves a premium app and complex configuration, so unless you don't like option 1, I think it's best to leave it alone for now.

Add new columns to your table for POC (or more than one if more than one people needs to have access) and a column "product" (it's probably best if this is your Pirmary column). You will need to have all your products and all the questions per product in that sheet.

Then create a report using the sheet as source, add all the columns your POC needs to be able to edit or see. I would also recommend you to group the report by product so the questions are ordered per product and not alphabetically. In the filters, make sure that items are filter by POC is Current User, so they will only see what they are added as POC on. That usually means it's empty for you, so to test it you can add yourself as a POC temporarily.

Now important bit you need to share both the source sheet and report with all potentials POCS as editors. On the source sheet though, make sure that the columns you don't want them to be able to edit are "locked" (so only admins can edit them). Also, do not send notifications when you share the sheet and the report. Here I also recommend doing the sharing with smartsheet groups if possible, so in the future you can simply add them to a group of POC and they wil be shared both items automatically.

Finally, use the source sheet to set up an automation to send a notification to the POC (when you check a box next to their name for example?) that part might require some creative thinking as you have several lines per POC but you want to send only one notification per POC per product. For the notification, I recommend the option message only, and add the link to the report manually in the message you send, so POC get sent the report only, and they don't get access to the Sheet.