Sheet ownership in the workplace

Kathy Coulthard

Summary : 2 questions.

1. Moving sheets in a workspace changes ownership - Why - can I stop this happening

2. Reporting in workspace does not appear to allow for additional sheets in a workspace folder to be updated to the report.?? When creating the report and the folder inside the workspace is selected it shows only the individual sheets at the time of creation so new sheets are not included in future reports?!?

Our company has 2 Workspaces - One for current job sheets (WIP Workspace) and then for reporting, we have another Workspace for archiving these jobs/sheets. We found it made reporting much easier as the sheets are constantly being moved from WIP Workspace to Archived Workspace. My issue is that it appears that if a person other than the owner of the sheet moves it between workspaces or even folders within that it changes the ownership of the sheet to the person moving it. Is this correct or am I doing something wrong? I only want to move the sheet not take ownership.

To clarify why we have 2 workspaces it seems that when I setup 1 Workspace with a folder for WIP and another folder within the same workspace called Archived when setting up a report based on the WIP folder it would only show the current sheets in the folder so as new sheets were entered the report would simply not include them. It appears to work differently in the SHEETS section. Again I may have setup something incorrectly but could not find a way around this except for having the 2 workspaces.  

Shaine Greenwood

Hi Kathy,

There isn't a way to stop the permissions change when dragging an item into a workspace. Workspaces are designed to instantly share something with everyone that is shared to the workspace. You might consider sharing everyone to the workspace with the lowest permissions, as well as removing people from being shared to the workspace when you don't want them to see every item within it.

You can then selectively share certain items inside of a workspace with them as needed. Think of workspace sharing as additive, instead of subtractive—meaning you can't go in and subtract someone's permissions selectively, but you can selectively add someone's permissions. More on workspace sharing here: https://help.smartsheet.com/articles/522067-workspace-sharing

On #2, you're correct. Selecting folders for reports will only include the items there at that time. This is mainly a precautionary method to prevent unwanted data from being included in a report. For instance, if you select a folder and then later someone adds another sheet to that folder, the new sheet data might be included in the report whether you want it to or not. There currently isn't a way to change this behavior, but please submit a Product Enhancement Request (using the form under Quick links on the right of the community site) to let our Product team know that you'd like to have this feature added to Smartsheet.

Kathy Coulthard

Thank you for your suggestions. I think for our circumstances I will just have to get the owner to move their sheets into correct folders from now on. Thank you!