Feature Request: Comprehensive Notification Setting

We need the option to set our notifications to include ALL changes, not just the changes of others.

Right now if you subscribe to sheet notifications, the only way to get a full list of what changed is if you don't make any changes to the sheet yourself. Boooooo. Why can't I choose?

Currently, if you have notifications set up for you on a sheet - it will only send you information if the changes in the sheet were not made by you. You get an email once a day to tell you about everything on the sheet that changed - except what you did.

So, let's say you want to forward this email along to someone outside of your workgroup for their information, or your N+2 manager as an update. I can forward this along to them, but it won't contain ALL the information about what changed in the sheet if I made any changes.

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Comments

J. Craig Williams

Try a new user - if you have corporate IT, have them set up an alias for you. Set up the sheet's alerts using that user, but don't do anything else (no formulas or formatting or anything - just to be sure)

If you are using gmail, you can use fake emails pretty easily that go to your regular Gmail account.

According to Gmail.

this.email@gmail.com

is the same as

ThisEmail@gmail.com

but Smartsheet thinks they are different.

Hope this helps.

Craig

Brad Jones

Craig,

Thanks for the workaround idea. LA suggested this too. It won't solve the problem exactly, however. I have 10 people updating the sheets, but many many people subscribing to the notifications of the sheets (like a news report from the project site). I want all users to get a full report of the changes.

Ideally, this would be an option you could set in the system so that you can choose between "ALL changes" and "Changes of others".

J. Craig Williams

I see the problem and agree with your proposed solution. Seems like it won't do any harm.

If Corporate IT is involved, you could forward that dummy email to a group email distribution list.

Speaking of which, that could be done in Smartsheet with the Group function.

Add that as a feature request.

Craig

Dave D

Are changes made regularly? You could build a report that shows all the rows that were changed in the last X days (or today) then turn on highlight changes to highlight the exact cells then send the report as a PDF on a recurring basis.

J. Craig Williams

My first thought, Dave D, was this is brilliant.

Except for the number of columns (even with 10 "type" of sheets, the column names are unlikely to be the same (and I don't mean the ones that SHOULD be the same but aren't because of, well just because). And then you end up with a quilt work pattern of rows even 2 sheets with two different purposes (and thus 2 different column names) would at best look something like this.

[common columns][changes from sheet group 1][no common columns ]

[common columns][no common columns ][changes from sheet group 2]

But, you could create one report per sheet type.

Reports require sharing - and I prefer to give permissions on need-to-know basis.

Especially sensitive financial and personal data.

It also keep the clutter down for the end-user.

So not quite brilliant, but certainly exceptional. And something in the back of my mind says "there's more here..."

Craig

Brad Jones

Thank you all for your comments and input. The scenario is that I have a project where the PM and Site Management need updates from the team activity on a daily basis. Other speicalists offsite also need to have these updates. So, the frequency is 'daily'.

My desire is to have something that does not require me to do anything manually other than set up the notificaitons once. If it were an option to "ignore My Updates" or "Receive All Changes" this would be great. At the moment a filter imposed by the design (likely for the convenience of those burdened with administrating too many sheets) is in the way of the information sharing I wish to achieve.

Brad Jones

Any word from the Smartsheet staff on this one? It's really a pain for me.

Kennedy Stomps

Hi Brad-- I can add your vote for this change to the Notification functionality! I know that we are soliciting feedback for overall improvements to Notifications right now as part of our Conditional Notifications projects so I will also pass this feedback on to that PM directly.

Gwyneth C

Hi All,

As mentioned, we're actively working on this feature. If you have ten minutes to spare, we'd love to get your participation in a usability study we're running.

For more information, see this announcement:

https://community.smartsheet.com/announcement/weigh-smartsheets-next-strategic-feature

Brad Jones

Did not see this feature in the test bed. But we only went through 10 exercises. Will this update include the ability to see all changes, and not just the changes of others?