Search and replace contacts

Hello everyone! I'm having some issues getting my head around the search & replace function:

I have a standard project task with placeholder values for assignees (Ie "Project Manager" or "Consultant). In order to avoid manually entering every contact, I want to search and replace "Project Manager" with "John Doe". Unfortunately, this just changes the placeholder into plain text, and then I have to manually click it and link the flat text "John Doe" to the contact "John.doe@nowhere.com". This plan is very, very extensive and doing this manually is a huge time sink I'm trying to automate

I tried to do a substitution formula, but unfortunately (or should I say unformulately?) Contact rows do not seem to be compatible with them.

Has anyone required to do a similar thing?

Thank you!

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Paul Newcome

Unfortunately manually is your only option for now.

However... Formula compatibility in Contact columns is "coming soon".

Andrée Starå

Hi,

Until it's possible to use formulas in contact columns (can't wait), there is an excellent workaround that I use. Even though formulas don't work, cell-linking does.

What I usually do when I build solutions for my clients. I add a directory of roles for the project, and then cell link those to the relevant contact fields and when a project starts my client can change the Consultant for example and it will cell-link to all relevant tasks automatically, and that also makes it simple to replace the placeholders as needed.

Hope that helps!

Have a fantastic weekend!

Best,

Andrée Starå

Workflow Consultant @ Get Done Consulting

Paul Newcome

Andree,

Great workaround! I never thought to even try cell linking to see if it would work.

Andrée Starå

Paul,

Thanks!

When I discovered it, My first thought "after I screamed out in joy" was, how much time I would have saved if I knew it earlier Haha!

Paul Newcome

Hahaha. I've already made out a list of where I plan to use this in current and future sheets.

Seb962

Hello Andre,

Thank you very much for the information! That is a great work around. Sorry to be a pain, but I'm having a bit of an issue when actually trying the solution: I link "Client" to a contact in another sheet, but how do you then replace all of the other tasks that are assigned to "Client" without copy pasting? Would you be able to provide an example of your workaround?

Thanks once again for the help!

Sebastian.

Debbie Sawyer

This might be useful to you:

https://www.smarterbusinessprocesses.com/smarter-mini-control-center-smarter-data-manager/

Kind regards

Debbie

Andrée Starå

Happy to help!

You have to cell link each contact in the directory to each instance of that role on the sheet.

When you change it in the directory, it will then update all cell-linked fields to that role.

Make sense?

Seb962

Thank you everyone for your amazing help!!! All solved now

Andrée Starå

Excellent!

Happy to help!

Paul Newcome

iPhonebore

Is this a facility that is built in without workarounds now? Search and replace should be an easy function?

Paul Newcome

@iPhonebore What do you mean? What exactly are you wanting to accomplish? This is a very old thread, so there may have been an update to allow the functionality you are looking for.

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