How to I "not format" a number in a form?

Lainie Franklin · 01/02/19

Ricki,

The information is coming in through a Smartsheet form. I don't know if that makes a difference.

ricki · 01/02/19

very interesting .... I created a form and was able to see the behavior described in the thread. What I found was that if I entered something like '2016,2017 or =2016,2017 from the field on the form then smartsheet knew it was purely text and didn't reformat it. It means that there is the ' ( or lingering in the smartsheet but that may be easier then adding extra code to concatenate multiple fields .....

2016,,2017 seems to work as well

Paul Newcome · 01/03/19

One important factor that has been overlooked...

What is the purpose of collecting the data? Are you intending to compile with historical counts for tracking? Are you displaying this information somewhere?

Knowing your end goal for this data will most certainly help us find the solution that best works for you as right now, you do have multiple options with different outcomes presented.

Lainie Franklin · 01/03/19

The purpose of the data is to find out what years a potential nominee for office as attended our Annual Meeting. For some people it is one year for others it is multiple -- could be ten or more. It is not a required field, so we will have to manually fill in the information if the person doing the nominating doesn't know.

We use the data to determine whether someone is eligible to serve in specific volunteer roles. For now, the way it comes in is workable, I was just hoping to make it format the way I wanted without any manipulation. Because we don't anticipate more than 20 - 25 entries to come in, I'm ok with the way it works now.

Thanks!

Paul Newcome · 01/03/19

Ah. Ok. Well if you did go the route of using checkboxes for each year, you could then simply use a COUNTIFS function to tally up how many boxes are checked (years attended). You could also set up an update request so that you get an email only when an entry is made with NO years selected.

But with only 20 - 25 entries coming in, it may be easier to just continue with what is working for you.

Best of luck to you!