CTRL + D function and How Thinking I was Pressing Windows + D Wreaked Havoc

@CollabMeganPMP

I did a search for any similar articles or posts, but could not find one.

A little background - I am considered one of my company's Smartsheet experts and have been using the system for many years now. Never in my use of the product have I encountered this dreadful situation and I feel that others should be warned and that Smartsheet should add in some prompts to prevent this from happening to anyone else.

I have a sheet that is 1750 rows by 25+ columns. It is an inventory tracking sheet for hardware that is deployed within our organization. We created a report that pulled any rows with a purchase date between 1/1/19 and 12/31/19. I added in about 10 columns for the report. The report, when run, returned 496 rows. Since I already had an Excel sheet started that had data in it with the same columns I wanted to COPY and PASTE the Smartsheet data into my Excel spreadsheet. Easy enough, right? Here is where my issues started. I did the COPY from Smartsheet and the PASTE into Excel. Then somehow, unbeknownst to me, the Smartsheet window came into focus as the primary window. I am a habitual Windows + D key user to get to my desktop. So since my fingers had been so trained to use the CTRL key from all of that copying and pasting, I must have hit CTRL + D instead of Windows + D with the Smartsheet window active. As I went on my merry way working in the Excel sheet I had to look something up in Smartsheet. That is when I realized I had 496 DUPLICATE rows and the sheet had already autosaved!!! UGH...the AGONY.

Yes, I do have backups....BUT they are Excel AND they carry no cell history. I called support and they (John) ported over a snapshot Excel sheet from earlier in the day, but if I used that to recreate my ENTIRE sheet I was losing cell history for EVERY cell (43,750+ cells) versus taking what I had just pasted in Excel and copying it back into the Smartsheet report I had originally copied it from. Now here is where it got tedious...to make sure I was not making things worse, I had to check the cell history of each cell in my primary column in the report to make sure that they lined up in exact order in my Excel sheet - I was not trusting Smartsheet very much at the moment and did not want to take any risks that any other data had shifted in either Smartsheet or Excel.

Now the cell history for each of those 4,960 cells has erroneous data in it, but at least it's fixed.

2 things here Smartsheet -

1. If CTRL + D is executed on a sheet the user should be PROMPTED to overwrite the data.
2. Smartsheet should really be able to reverse engineer changes made to a sheet by working back the activity in the Activity Log. An Excel spreadsheet is so flat and so much is lost in the data and cell history if that is the only backup. You should be able to right-click activity and have it be "undone" in the sheet. Kind of like how SharePoint lets you revert to a previous version....

Has anyone else had this annoying thing happen to them??

Lesson learned in the interim - if you want to copy and paste lots of data from a report EXPORT the darn thing first!!!