Dear Smartsheet,
The issue
- import of a google/excel sheet containing an "Assigned To" column fails to assign to known smartsheet users any of the tasks listed in the file that was imported with matching user names/email addresses
- The specific problem is that even though the name or email address values in the file imported are correct in the "Assigned To" column and also match the name/email addresses of the user accounts in smartsheet, the import process does not link the rows to the correct user or offer a single-click approach to be able to achieve this.
One workaround is possible but only after the file has been imported and requires a manual edit of the smartsheet file created by the import process to one by one assign each individual row to the correct user. Clearly this is a significant manual effort and arguably is a workaround to a flaw in the import.
Suggested product fix/enhancement
Perhaps the Smartsheet product team could enhance the import process to support recognition of smartsheet user account name/email address by stipulating a required format of the cell value in the file to be imported so as to trigger the import process to link the row to a known user associated with the account where the import is processed? Being a software engineer myself, I suspect that this would not be a complex feature to build into the import process, perhaps a couple of weeks at most of coding and testing.
After some searching, it appears that this issue with importing files has been known for some time because it has been reported by other users as far back as 2015. Hence, I'm curious to know if there is any plan to fix/support this soon?
It seems to be a significant flaw in the product, causing lots of manual workarounds that are tolerable for a small set of data but for large amounts of data becomes unworkable.
Thanks.
