Contact lists and Contact groups. Is there a way to import contacts from the contacts list?

Graham Rimell

Our business has a few hundred Employees split up into different areas and groups.

As part of our various smartsheets project we have a form with a row that has a drop down menu for name, with everyone in the business listed. I want to add various groups of employees to a contact cell, sometimes the entire contact list of employees!

However this is a very manual task that requires me to go through a list from A to Z. This would be fine if I was adding 10 people, but I'm trying to add about 300 people. Spending an hour manually doing this is pretty awful, and not reliable as there's no easy way to ensure you don't accidentally miss a person.

The contact list and a group that has everyone in it, but there seems to be no way to simply say 'Import all from group'.

This simple functionality would save us hours.

Is there any workarounds to allow us to do this?

Thanks!

David Tutwiler

Yes. If you have that list in either:

1) A Smartsheet Attachment

2) Google Sheet on Google Drive

3) Document in One Drive

then you can use Data Uploader to schedule an import into a drop down list at regular intervals. So, if you attach this list to the Smartsheet that you want to use this for, then you can set up a schedule that says, "Go check this attachment to see if it has changed and update my drop down accordingly" every week/day/hour depending on your requirements.

Graham Rimell

We don't have the Data Uploader add on. Is this the only way to do this?

Constance King

I have this same issue.

Graham Rimell

We've managed to find a work around to this and it's pretty easy.

Create a Users Grid with columns with Names and Emails listed. Then in a column next to to it put in:

=Name@row + " <" + Email@row + ">"

You end up with a name and email formatted like: John Smith <John.Smith@gmail.com>

Highlight and copy all of the rows of names you want, and then go to the column properties of the cell you want to add them too. Start off selecting column single select, and copy the list of names in.

Save it, save the grid. Then re-enter the column properties and set it to Contacts. Smartsheet is clever enough to recognise that as the format for the contacts and switches them all to contacts.

paulen

@GrahamR Great! Thanks