How to protect rows in a sheet from deletion but allowing update for non-licensed users?

Jacques Frein

Hello all,

I have created a data sheet with KPI's for our team members (non-licensed users).

I have created a dashboard so they could see their personal KPI's but I don't want them to have access to the full table, for confidentiality reason. I use report to create diagrams but they don't have access to the data. How can I solve this situation?

Thanks a lot for your help

Jacques Frein

Apologies, I mixed up 2 issues: the title is not related to the description. I will create another post.

Still, the current title is valid: I have created a sheet template with a task list and I want some of them to be mandatory with no possibility from deleting them, but still being editable by non-licensed users with Admin access. How can I do that?

Thanks for your help

Genevieve P.

Hi @Jacques Frein

Would you be able to post a screen capture of your Dashboard (but block out any sensitive data), and then explain what you want each user to see?

Charts and graphs will still be visible to Dashboard viewers, even if they are not shared to the source data. However if you want each logged in user to see different data, this gets a bit more complicated. You may need to create separate Dashboards for each individual user. To make this process easier, you can copy a Dashboard by "saving it as new" and then just adjust the data to show the correct information.

For your second question, I see that you currently are discussing this with Community members on your other post, so I'll leave that to be discussed in the other post.

Cheers!

Genevieve

Jacques Frein

Hi Genevieve,

I have created another discussion stream about the dashboard and, indeed, I am already in touch with a few people to try to solve it.

I would like this stream to be consistent with the title: How to protect rows in a sheet from deletion but allowing update for non-licensed users? Do you have any idea if it is possible in smartsheet?

Thanks

Best regards

Jacques

Genevieve P.

Hi Jacques,

Providing Editor access allows users to Edit rows completely, including the ability to delete rows. If you wanted to prevent deletions you can LOCK the rows, but then they couldn't edit any of the content at all.

Admin Permissions would allow specific users to unlock rows to make edits, but again, this means they have the ability to delete those rows. (See a list of Permission abilities here.)

One possible way to work around this would be to share the sheet with Viewer permission only, not allowing edits, and then send Update Requests to specific users when you want them to change the content of the rows. That way they won't be able to delete rows, but then could make updates when required. You can set up automated workflows to request edits based on specific criteria (see here).

If this won't work for you, then it may not be possible to work within the core app of Smartsheet in the way you want. I would suggest that the Premium App, Dynamic View, would be a possible solution (see here).

Jacques Frein

Thank you Genevieve.

Unfortunately, the differente work around you propose are not applicable. I explored already some of them and this does not solve the problem without completely changing our processes.

I was in touch with somebody from smartsheet yesterday and he confirmed it is not possible.

Thank you for your help.

Best regards

Jacques