Adding Contacts to Primary Sheet From Bulk Upload Sheet

Brandon Snyder

Hi,

I am working on a Huddle Board solution using swim lanes. These are keyed off of a Primary Responsible Contact column with the contacts listed out in the background for selection. Part of this solution will allow to visualize standard work versus ad hoc. To get all of the standard work loaded each month, my best solution has been to have Managers keep a side Excel file of all of their standard work to load. So, a couple of questions:

1) Aside from bulk loading standard work for each month, is there another way to get that into a task tracking sheet?

2) When bulk uploading tasks (done on a SmartSheet that then transfers the records over to the Primary Sheet), I lose the Contact field functionality, and would have to have someone periodically check the Primary Sheet to make sure that all of the Contacts are in the right format; this is supporting Card View visualization. How can I format the bulk uploaded Contacts to show up on the Primary Responsible column in the correct format? I tried using the email addresses and the person's name, but neither spit out the right format for the Card View; I would like to have the person's name displayed instead of their email (though could move to email as the "Name" field if that's what's required).

Ben Goldblatt

Hi @Brandon Snyder,

For your first question, if you're looking for a way to automatically load Excel information into an existing sheet on a scheduled basis, rather than manually importing and consolidating data each month, you may want to look into the Data Uploader premium app. With the Data Uploader, you have the ability to:

• Update existing rows and insert new rows in Smartsheet from other applications that can export .csv, Excel, or Google Sheets
• Replace all rows in an existing sheet in Smartsheet with the latest uploaded file
• Schedule workflows to run as often as necessary to meet business needs

For automatically updating contacts in your contact list column, it may be possible to use the Smartsheet API or the Bridge by Smartsheet functionality to update the column values to get the system to recognize them as actual contacts. Check out the following resources from the Learning Center to learn more about the Smartsheet API and Bridge:

API

• Where to Find Information About the Smartsheet API
• Smartsheet Has an API? What Is That and Why Would I Want to Use It? (webinar)
• Tips and Tricks for the Smartsheet API

Bridge

• Bridge by Smartsheet
• Help Resources for Bridge by Smartsheet
• Bridge System Requirements and Key Integrations 

I hope this helps

Thanks,

Ben