Commenting your code

Brett Evans

Where do you comment your code?

 

When working on a big sheet that you may have to come back to months from now, or a system of sheets you are working on with other Admins, how do you document code 'inline'?

 

Hidden columns? Attachments?  What have you found successful?

Rob Hagan

Hi Brett,

Probably the simplest approach is to use the existing Comment field that is the third column from the left in the "standard" sheet. The comment is not visible until the cell is selected though.

As you mention, attachments can also be used. Perhaps a bit clumsy for the purpose.

We have built comments into our approach where we formally distinguish types of rows. We have a [Row Type] field with values of "Task", "Milestone", "Deliverable", "Comment" and "Request" and then the commentary is visible as the text in the [Task] field. We find this works very well for us. Our [Row Type] is a locked column with the formula: =IF(Req?1, "Request", IF(COUNT(CHILDREN()) = 0, IF(ISBLANK(Duration1), "Comment", IF(Duration1 = 0, "Milestone", "Task")), "Deliverable"))

Cheers,

Rob.

J. Craig Williams

I often create a NAME_Columns sheet for the big ones where NAME is the name of the sheet.

In that I document the columns, type, where produced, where consumed, if they have a 'standard' formula is it there too.

 

I use the Comments for the specific row to document revision of the formulas.

 

Craig

JamesR

This is something that I would really like to see some assistance from Smartsheet.

Some fairly simple things could make our lives so much more comfortable:

• In the Sheet properties have an Export Sheet Schema, which produces a Document(PDF) that outlines the Structure of the sheet, lists its Formulae, links in and links out, location Shares and Permissions. All Reports that reference it, Notifications (Alerts and Reminders). Conditional formatting rules.
• An enhanced Export to excel that includes Excel equivelent Formulae.  If they can import formulae they should be able to export same.

MS Access has a documentation option that produced this and more.