Using Sheet Summary Field in a Workflow Alert

Karen Hansard

Hello - Is it possible to set up a workflow alert on a sheet summary field? I would like to be notified when a sheet summary field is updated.

Thanks

Andrée Starå

Hi @Karen Hansard

Yes, but you'll need to use a so-called helper column where you'd show the values from the Sheet Summary and have an alert for those.

Would that work/help?

I hope that helps!

Be safe and have a fantastic week!

Best,

Andrée Starå | Workflow Consultant / CEO @ WORK BOLD

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Bob Kahn

Hi @Andrée Starå , I am interested in the same functionality. I ended up creating a column that has the exact same information for every row. is this what you mean by a helper column?

Here is my use case: I have a sheet that has a list of customers. I move a number of rows to a different sheet to allow our customer care agents to make calls. I am computing the number of weeks left in my sheet before the data runs out. When my "candidate" sheet gets low I want to alert someone that there are only N weeks left and they need to replenish the data. The problem is that since it is a row level variable it will repeat in the alert for how ever many rows I have left. I even tried doing a message only Alert and referencing the value in the sentence {{WeeksLeft}} and that too produced multiple lines.

Any suggestions to overcome this problem are welcome. Hopefully my explanation made sense.

Thanks

Bob Kahn

Caitlin Smith

@Andrée Starå Have the same problem as Bob, is it in the roadmap add these smartsheet reference to the roadmap. I basically have to add about 20 columns because of this in hundreds of sheets. It does not make sense.

mknighton

Same issue I want to send a notification when a countM() value reaches a limit. I have a locked row where these values live but I can only figure out how to get to row data in the workflow. Any insight would be helpful.

RAllen

So many holes in the SS Functionality... The answer is "No" it cannot. SS Should be able to reference any form, sheet or sheet summary directly but for some reason it doesn't. I have a link I want to include in the workflow messages. To do that I have to set a column to a value to lookup those values form another sheet where all my links are located. I trick the column starting an INDEX function so I can use that to create a named reference to another sheet then remove the INDEX leaving the column function as just "{Othersheet:Myfiled}" and convert that to a column function.

With pointers, and addresses, it shouldn't matter and we should be able to reference other sheets without duplicating columns!