Out of Office Calendar - recurrent events

BarbraF

We want to use Smartsheets to set up an out of office calendar for vacations, work trips, working from home etc. We are capturing name, dates, and reason for being out of the office. We planned on having staff enter in OOO on a form and then have the calendar show on a dashboard so it is easy to know if someone is out. It's pretty simple for the one time events. However many of my staff work from home one day a week. Is there a way to easily enter that in short of entering a new line for each week?

Paul Newcome

Could you provide some screenshots/examples? Seeing your layout along with more detail as to your desired result will certainly help us find a solution.

Andrée Starå

Hi Barbra,

It's quite easy to set up if there are some patterns for when they work from home. You could have everything on one sheet or split them by employee and the collect everything on a report instead.

Is there any pattern?

Happy Holidays & Happy New Year!

Best,

Andrée Starå

Workflow Consultant @ Get Done Consulting

BarbraF

I uploaded an example of the sheet that I created, the form that staff will use to add out-of-office events, and then a view of the published calendar. We have a number of people who work from home on Tuesday or Friday. My worst case scenario is to have an admin periodically enter in a couple of months of work-from-home days. But I would prefer to find a way to do it more efficiently.

Thanks! Happy New Year!

Barbra

 

 

Andrée Starå

Happy to help!

I think the easiest way would be to either have one sheet per employee for the recurring dates and the form for everything else or you could have someone create the recurring dates on one or multiple sheets with the help of some formulas and filters.

Would that work? Which method would you prefer?

Best,

Andrée

Paul Newcome

Displaying on a calendar view requires having only one date or set of dates (start/finish) per row.

 

I am not sure if a third party app would help or not, but you would need a new row for each entry.

 

Depending on how you have everything working though, it may be possible to set up some automation to allow each person to fill out an update request or a series of update requests. It's something I would have to play around with and do some testing on if that sounds like it may work for you.

 

It would be something along the lines of an update request with Checkboxes for each day of the week with the update request specifying which week it is for. You would use those checkboxes to hit against actual dates within the sheet and would in turn populate your calendar view. It may even be possible to send it out monthly.

 

At this point it's just a very rough idea though, but if you are interested I could work on something like it for you in my spare time.

BarbraF

Thanks for the ideas. I will need to discuss with some staff members to see what they think.

Andrée Starå

I'm always happy to help!

Best,

Andrée