Issue with Multiple Automation Email's

Hello,

I'm trying to implement some automation in a particular sheet and having some issues with email notifications and approvals arriving to my email Inbox. My sheet is set up like so:

I am tracking the status of experiments. For a master experiment, there is a subset of children below it. As the children are complete, they are marked as such by the user and a data log attached manually by the user. An email alert then should be sent to a group of users notifying them of these experiments completion. It seems that if I set one experiment to Complete and attach my data log, the email notification is sent correctly but if I set multiple to complete in a short time and attach multiple their data logs, it still only sends one email containing the information for one experiment. That is Issue #1.

Issue #2 relates to the master experiment. I have a formula set up that states if all children experiments are completed, the master experiment is automatically set to complete.Upon this change in status of the master, an approval alert email is sent to the owner (me in this case) requesting my approval of all the work completed to date. As expected, this alert should trigger immediately after the final experiment is set to complete but it is not working. I can't set my trigger to hourly/weekly etc as the approval action is to lock rows.

I'm unsure of what workaround I can try and unsure if it is simply a glitch I have encountered by asking Smartsheet to send multiple email alerts in quick succession. Any help would be appreciated.

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Andrée Starå

Hi,

If you want to make sure that the notifications are sent one by one (up to six notification) you'll need to update the workflow structure or use placeholders.

Make sense?

Can you describe your process in more detail and maybe share the sheet(s)/copies of the sheet(s) or some screenshots? (Delete/replace any confidential/sensitive information before sharing) That would make it easier to help. (share too, andree@getdone.se)

I hope that helps!

Have a fantastic week!

Best,

Andrée Starå

Workflow Consultant / CEO @ WORK BOLD

GSheehan

Hi Andree,

Thanks for the comment. Apologies, I don't fully understand what your mean by updating the workflow structure or using placeholders. Below is a screenshot of my main sheet. As you can see, HCI is the experiment type. Underneath that I have the master experiment indented called 205V NDMOS and then within that I have a heading called 205Vd. Underneath that heading I then have 3x experiments: 5Vg, 5.5Vg and 6Vg.

So relating to Issue 1 in my first post, if I were to set 5Vg and 5.5Vg to Complete and attach their respective data logs, I only receive 1 email telling me that one of them has completed and not 2 separate emails with the details of both as expected.

Below is the workflow I have set up relating to Issue 1.

Then relating to Issue 2, I have the sheet set up so that as the individual experiments are completed, the cell beside the master experiment (205V NDMOS in this case) is changed to Complete through an IF statement formula. I have another workflow, as seen below, that is supposed to send an email approval request to an individual when this master experiment cell is set to complete. This does not seem to be working either.

Thanks in advance for the help.

Andrée Starå

@GSheehan,

Here are some more information about placeholders.

More info:

https://help.smartsheet.com/articles/2477796-dynamically-add-cell-data-in-the-subject-and-body-of-request-messages

Pro tip. Use Placeholders to make it easy to change a specific text in the alert. Change once and it updates in alls alerts that has the placeholder.

Let me know if you need more help!

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