Dates and months issue

Risto Nykanen

Hello,

Are there others or many experienceing issues that Smartsheet swaps months to dates and vica versa?

I have now had this issue several times and informed SS about it. For some reason the issue goes away after letting SS know (maybe they do something) about it but then it comes back after a month or so. This has now happend three or four times at least. It's not optimal making my monthly reports wrong.

This issue happens with control center. We have a weekly status update sheet where every new week has a new row. The summary section searches the newest record/row and collects all data from that week to sheet summary section. From summary section the metadata is collected to master/blueprint summary sheet that collects the data from all projects. The final portfolio report is made from the master summary sheet.

It seems the data or date is still correct at the sheet summary section (the date is converted to text/number as it is metadata) buth the month and data is swapped when it goes from summary section metada to master summary sheet (a date column).

The challenge is that this happens only for some projects and not always. It seems to happen for projects that even have same date format (european) that when i'm seeing the report (european date).

Is this a known issue with control center or am I the only one? How could this issues be eliminated?

Risto

Genevieve P.

Hi Risto,

My first thought would be that it has to do with the adjustment from when the date is converted to text/number and then back into a date, and the different personal/localized settings.

I would suggest that if you can link out the date value as a date type of content, you may see more consistent results.

Risto Nykanen

Genevieve,

If I understand you correctly I agree with you that linking date data directly should be more robust way but since the date is stored as control center metadata ( in sheet summary section) and that is always number/text and I don't know how to or if I should eliminate this intermediate step. It is a feature of the control center and the initial solution was develop by Smartsheet consultants themselves. Maybe I just need to contact them again, or we should stop using the first 12 days of the month since day 13 and forward don't seem to have this issue ;) I guess there is a data validation of some sort that don't accept month 13.

Genevieve P.

Hi Risto,

If this was built by a consultant then yes, reaching out to them would be best. I would also suggest that you could look into adjusting the sheet summary field to be a Date Type of sheet summary field (they are not limited to text/number).