Bug: Pasting from Excel with quotation marks fails to find end of row

nicejacket

Relevant xkcd

Pasting a selection from Excel into Smartsheet fails to find the end of row if you include (1) double quotation mark ( " ). See below.

As an example, pasting the data above from Excel to a Smartsheet grid produces the following result:

It appears that Smartsheet is not catching and escaping these characters, causing all data beyond the quote mark to become one very long row. Two double quotes ( " " ) does not generate this error, nor does use of a single single quote / apostrophe ( ' ).

Andrée Starå

Hi,

If you haven’t already, I would recommend that you reach out to the Smartsheet Support Team. Smartsheet Support Team

I hope that helps!

Have a fantastic weekend!

Best,

Andrée Starå

Workflow Consultant / CEO @ WORK BOLD

Jim Hook

I'm having a similar problem this morning. On a daily basis I bring in data from another program via copy/paste into a Smartsheet and have been doing this almost daily for over two years with no problems. Now the paste (cmd-v on my Mac using Chrome) only pastes in a fraction of the cells in the copied data (77 out of 381). Totally unusable now. Seems like something changed in Smartsheet since the data pastes properly into a Google spreadsheet.

Update: just looked at the data in more detail and discovered that all of the remaining data after cell 77 is being pasted into cell 77 so for some reason the Smartsheet paste command is missing the end of cell in the 77th cell.

Andrée Starå

That is weird!

Have you heard anything back from the Support?

Jim Hook

I heard back initially with Support saying that they couldn't duplicate the problem. So, I replied with screenshots and more detail. That was last week and no response. I use a Mac and Chrome and copying from other programs and pasting into Smartsheet never has worked quite right but it was repeatable so I was able to make it work. It's possible that something changed in the Mac OS or Chrome that caused things to work differently. Fortunately, I was able to get some development time in my company to create an API transfer so I no longer need to copy/paste. I've let Support know that I no longer have a problem.

Andrée Starå

Glad to hear that you solved it!