Tracking Time Spent on Tasks & Web Forms

Chris Easterwood

Is there a way to have a web form response update or add to a value on an individual task rather than creating a new row. An example of what I am looking for is to have a time card or time worked web form so project members can record hours spent on a specific task, which would then update an hours field for an individual task. They would also have to be able to select a row to be updated form the sheet within the web form. Open to other idea's or examples of anything working for other users.

Travis

Hi Chris, Web forms can only be used to add new rows to a sheet. There are a couple of workarounds which you might consider using. 

 

Update Requests gives you the ability to send a single row or multiple rows to anyone via email. The recipient will see only the rows you selected and can make their changes to the rows. Once submitted, their changes will be immediately reflected in the sheet.

 

Another option is the reporting tool which can show someone a custom view of only tasks that are assigned to them. They can view and make changes to these tasks directly from the report. Just note, in order to view data in a report, the user must be shared to the sheet(s) the report is pulling from.  

Chris Easterwood

Hi Travis, Thanks for your response. I understand the worksarounds but they are not great options. It would be a cool enhancement to allow a web form to have a list field that could pull from the tasks in the sheet it is referencing. This would allow us to calculate the total actual hours spent for a task by using a simple SUMIF function. IDEALLY, it would be super cool if there was just a time tracking function that could be enabled to a sheet which would do something similar. 

Travis

Chris - we are in the final stages of developing the ability to track duration in increments smaller than a whole day (hours, minutes, etc). Follow this thread to learn more about this functionality and to be emailed when there are updates: https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/need-column-property-type-clock-or-time-day

Chuck Muirhead

We use webforms alot and this feature will increase dramitcally this year for our clients.  It would be a great feature to be able to select a row number to add webform content to, or as an alternative have a choice to add new row before/after specific row number.  We will be adding a sheet for each client this year and they will have multiple webforms to use to get us data or infomation.  Each time a webform is added, we must manually go to the sheet and drag it up to where we want it.  We will deal with it of course, but a feature to select where new rows are placed (other than first/last) would exand our webform use. 

 

Travis

Chuck - I will submit your feedback to our product team for consideration in future development. As a workaround, I would look into using update requests, which will allow you to send a specific row to a user for them to update. You would need to select each row you want to send to each user, but it would be a similar workflow to what you are suggesting with selecting a specific location for a form entry to be added to. 

Travis

I am happy to announce the ability to set partial day duration (hours, minutes, and seconds) is here! Check out my announcement for more information and to ask questions: https://community.smartsheet.com/announcement/new-smartsheet-critical-path-and-duration-minutes-hours-and-weeks

Renee Durrance

Im looking for the ability to update a row using a smartsheet's web form based on the row's primary key.  

I understand that currently web forms only create new rows so I attempted to use webhooks for a work around only to find I had to specify the exact row # that I wanted updated.  I would be an extremely helpful tool if the webforms could be expanded to update based on the primary column's data.

Here's my use case:

I'd like to use smartsheets to maintain a list of client emails and their notification preferences.  I've set up client email address as my primary column.  I'd like to have a webform that I can distribute to all my clients that asks them to type in their email address and fill in the preference columns I have (outage notifications, promotional materials, feature annoncements, etc.).  Then upon their submission, the sheet would either be udpated their notification settings if the email address already existed in the primary column or a new row would be created if it was not found.

Are there any plans to be able to do something along these line or that could handle this in perhaps a different way?

Mariana

Hi, not sure if this accurately answers your question but may come handy. We are using TrackingTime for Timetracking with Smartsheet. It takes only one formula and you can get timesheets and reports out of your data automatically. 

Here's the link https://trackingtime.co/time-tracking-for-smartsheet

 

Hope you find it useful.

Cheers.

Mariana