Mechanize Alerts?

Ben Casey

I'm linking cells between two sheets A and B. When my project manager changes a row's start or end date in their sheet A that links to my sheet B, can I have an alert triggered by this change to notify me via email? Is there a better way to achieve this type of mechanization?

 

Another way said, once my PM is done with a task, I need my Administrator to automatically be notified to start their tasks.

Chuck Muirhead

Good morning Ben,

 

You can setup a notification to alert you anytime somehting changes on the sheet.  At the bottom of the screen, click on "Alerts", select "notifications".  It will automatically select your name, but you can choose others to notify as well.  then slect what you want to be notified about.  You can be notified when "Anything" changes, or you can select only the columns that are important.  For example, you want to be notified when your PM updates a project.  When that process happens, notifications will alert you that this has happened.  You can choose to be notified right away, once an hour, once a day, or once a week.  You can also setup multiple notifications, for example, you may want to know right awawy that your PM has made an update, but you want to know once a day if anything else changes on the sheet.  There are lots of ways you can customise the notifications feature....

Sam S

Great tip Chuck! as for letting your admin know their task is starting, user Reminders (located in the Alerts tab also). You can set a sheet lever reminder that looks to your contact list column and can automatically email whoever is assigned to a task on, before, or after the date in a date column (such as your start date column)

 

Reminders: http://help.smartsheet.com/customer/en/portal/articles/542913-using-reminders

Ben Casey

This is great feedback. We're trying to standardize our sheets so there is minimal change to the structure and our links and alerts can be reliable but its proving challenging because naturally its more than one sheet owned by different people. Please let me know if you think of anything else to mechanize. Thank you!

 

 

J. Craig Williams

Ben,

 

A few suggestions

 

1. Templates. Use them. Update them. Frown at people that don't use them (or whatever it takes to get them with the program).

And I don't mean the ones pre-built by Smartsheet, I mean the ones built by your team.

 

http://help.smartsheet.com/customer/en/portal/articles/522123-creating-using-templates

 

2. Copy and reuse workspaces and folders

If you have a set of docs and templates you have for a project (or project type), consolidate them into one or more workspaces. This avoids having to clean them up from old data when you start the next project.

 

http://help.smartsheet.com/customer/portal/articles/1782802

 

3. Document the features of your standards sheet. This includes how to use it, how to build it, how to configure it, how to update it. Sure that formula you just built is easy to understand, but tomorrow or six months from now, not so much maybe. 

 

4. Look for ways (like you doing) to ensure your functionality is the same across the various sheets and reports. Richard at SBP has a neat demo of using Azuqua to maintain dropdown content across the enterprise. A new entry in a sheet's dropdown list will propogate through the system without effort. If you have a lot of products, lots of customers, or whatever, that's really useful. 

 

And back to your "if you think of anything else to mechanize..." 

 

I keep these two things on my wall (courtesy of www.xkcd.com) and look at them before I start to automate anything (and I really like to automate things)

 

 

Hope that helps.

 

Craig

 

 

 

 

Ben Casey

JCW,

This is excellent! Thank you for taking the time to provide this. I'm definitely in-line with this methodology and vision. Now, off to execute.

Ben