Notifications and alerts - by demand (immediate)

Ofir Marco

Hi all,

Was wondering if there is a way to send notifications (alerts & reminders) to the entire sheet (all rows at once) whenever a user needs and not by a pre-defined rule?

For example, the sheet owner want to be able to send update requests or notifications in the middle of the week, not in a specific day that he/she knows in advance,

Just to go to work one day, realize some meeting is coming soon and to send notifications to update for all the assigned contacts.

 

Alison

Hello Ofir,

 

Thanks for this question!  Though you wouldn't be able to send a Notification, Update Request, or Reminder to all users on demand, you could send a manual Update Request or a Reminder on a row level (although Reminders send out between 12AM and 4AM in the timezone of the owner of the sheet, so you'd likely want to send those out the day before).

I've provided some information on some workarounds here:

If you'd like to send out a notification, you could create a rule to indicate "when a row changes" and "notify contact in column."  After this, you could insert a checkbox column and check the box or uncheck the box when you want a notification to send out.  You could then indicate what you want the notification to say in the message field (and that you'd like it to send right away) in Delivery Settings of the notification builder.  I've attached two screeenshots below of this.

 

You can find further information on sending Manual Update Requests at our Help Center here.

You can find further information on Reminders at our Help Center here.

 

Please let me know if you have further questions on this.

Kind regards,

Alison

Smartsheet Support

 

Ofir Marco

Hi Alison,

Thanks for the ideas. 

I see that the first way is to choose all rows (by selecting  the 1st row, Shift, and then the last row) and then send the update request a day before like you said.

The second option is to work around it with checkbox like you suggested.

Your idea got me there i think, i don't want the sheet owner to check all rows one by one, so what i did is i created a checkbox column with a formula:  

=IF(AND(NOT(ISBLANK([Module Owner]2)), $[Set notification (use 1st row only)]$1 = "Send now"), 1, 0)

That way all the rows that are assigned will immediately checked when someone will select "Send now" on a specific cell (see below screen shot with the cell and the rule).

You really led me there... so thank you.

Roger Koon

It seems like the "Email shared users" on the tool bar might be a good way to handle this as well, under some circumstances. This let's you enter a message before sending an email to everyone with access to a sheet. The custom message could be as simple as: "Please update your tasks before the meeting tomorrow." I almost used this feature on a sheet shared with everyone, just to communicate with everyone about something else (until I found a better approach).