Multiple Contact List suggestion

J. Craig Williams

My post is located here:

http://ronin-global.com/2018/10/04/smartsheet-multiple-contact-selection-is-here-now-what/

Summary: 

Don't rush.

Craig

Kyle Morgan

Thank you, Craig.

I agree. Don't rush.

While many Smartsheet users are probably dancing with glee as a result of this "improvement", I find that this may have done more harm than good to our current system as it is currently set up. (Smartsheet customer for close to 4 years and north of 400 sheets plus several hundred reports)

I predict a lot of coffee, late nights and angry emails in my inbox until I can sort through this.

Good luck to all of those that have found themselves, much to their surprise, in a similar situation.

Kyle

J. Craig Williams

I have tools that can ease the pain if you (or anyone else) is interested.

I prefer to avoid angry emails if at all possible. 

Craig

 

Daniel Stein

Thanks Craig and Kyle for your thoughtful feedback.

We are currently looking into how we might simplify the process of editing existing reports (and their underlying sheets) for customers who want to change their existing contact columns to allow multiple contacts. The current thinking is that single- and multi-contact columns should be considered part of the same column in reports as long as they share the same name. So toggling the "Allow multiple contacts per cell" setting in a sheet would not have an impact on reports, and the same columns would continue to flow through. Is this how you would expect it to work?

Best regards,

Daniel

J. Craig Williams

Since Column Names can not be duplicated in a Sheet, regardless of type, I would be OK with the Reports being agnostic about whether it was CONTACT_LIST or MULTI_CONTACT_LIST by name.

Caveat: It is 10pm and I've been sitting here for 14 hours, nearly full time. I may change my mind in the morning, but I doubt it.

When this is accomplished, it might be a short step to Text/Number and Dropdown Lists (and others) as they both show up in the "What?" criteria or any Date or Date-Time column in the "When?" criteria. This is a design choice I have never groked.

Thanks for the feedback.

Craig

Paul Newcome

Very well put, Craig. I have been trying to figure out a way to explain it to the more "New feature!!! Lets use it as much as possible and even make up reasons to use it because its new!!!" members of my team. I will definitely be directing them this way. I've been slow to implement this feature, testing it one piece at a time numerous times and in numerous ways. 

 

One of the more immediate concerns (for me at least) is how it works with notifications, reminders, etc. I've heard/seen a few complaints that it only works for the first person listed, but I personally haven't run across that issue.

 

One issue that I DID come across was referencing the contact column in a COUNTIFS. If I used =COUNT([Contact Column]:[Contact Column]) it would work perfectly., but... =COUNTIFS([Contact Column]:[Contact Column], NOT(ISBLANK(@cell))) would always return a result of zero. 

 

I ended up rebuilding the sheet and unchecked the box to allow multiple contacts. It now works just fine in the new sheet. I haven't yet had a chance to test it further to see if checking that box was what made the difference or if it was just a glitch in the original sheet.

Daniel Stein

Hi all,

We shipped an enhancement to reports so that they now automatically combine data from contact columns that have the same name, regardless of whether "Allow multiple contacts per cell" is turned on. So for all new reports and most existing reports, you'll no longer see 2 versions of the same column.

If you had already added both the single- and multi-contact version of the column to the report, you'll see that all the data is now combined under one column, and the other is blank. In this case, you can go ahead and remove the blank column from your report.

Best regards,

Daniel