Workaround for Voting

Elisa Rustenbach

Hello,

From other community questions I see that there is no voting functionality in Smartsheet but I am looking for a workaround. The use case is to have a system for internal enhancement requests to our ERP. Internal employees would have a link to a dashboard where they could look at requests that have already been submitted (through a form) and vote them up if they are looking for the same feature. Most of these employees will be using the free license.

Some ideas that might work if someone can tell me how to implement them:

• Assigning themselves to the row: This could count as a vote. Is there a way they can assign only themselves? A way to do this from a dashboard?
• Adding a comment: Similar to above, if they could add a comment that could be counted as a vote
• Any other creative way.

Related question: is there a way that I can link the request form in such a way that they can only access it once they have already looked through the existing requests? I want them to have to look before they submit to avoid duplication.

Thank you!

Elisa

Elisa Rustenbach

Thank you all! I just finished my voting system today. Love the dashboards and the url did work with a few adjustments

Andrée Starå

Hi @Elisa Rustenbach

I hope you're well and safe!

You could use an URL-Query structure for each request, and when they want to vote, they click on the specific link and add their vote. (the form should be set so that they have to be logged in, so you get the voters information)

https://help.smartsheet.com/articles/2478871-url-query-string-form-default-values

The submissions/votes can be collected in the same sheet or a so-called helper sheet, and you could also add a Workflow to check that they have only submitted once.

How many submitters/voters can there be?

If you use the URL-Query feature, they would have to look at the requests available and vote or add from there.

Make sense?

Would that work/help?

I hope that helps!

Be safe and have a fantastic day!

Best,

Andrée Starå | Workflow Consultant / CEO @ WORK BOLD

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Elisa Rustenbach

Hi @Andrée Starå!

Sounds promising! I will give it a shot today or tomorrow as time allows and let you know!

Thank you!!!

Elisa

Elisa Rustenbach

Hi @Andrée Starå,

The idea works in theory but I am not sure it will in practice due to special characters. I created a this formula:

="https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/160a6acf19a642f08ed2ab443337194c?Subject=" + SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(Subject@row, " ", "%20"), ",", "%2C") + "&Description=" + SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(Description@row, " ", "%20"), ",", "%2C") + "&Request_ID=" + [Request_ID]

This takes care of commas and spaces but I would need to manually add all special characters and, at least in excel, there is a limit of 7 nested substitute statements. If I do this with too many fields, I am also going to hit the character limit on urls.

Sadly, this is the only reason this doesn't work. Otherwise its golden! A few questions:

• Any way to restrict special characters on forms? I could handle this if it was less.
• Any other way to encode the url?

Thank you!

Elisa

Elisa Rustenbach

Hi @Andrée Starå,

One more question - any way you know to turn the link (its very long) into something like the blue underlined "Link" or some other word?

Thanks!

Elisa

Paul Newcome

The only limit to nesting the SUBSTITUTE function that I have found thus far is that you cannot exceed 4,000 characters per cell (including spaces), but there is also the concern for URLs being too long as you said.

Another option would be to assign an easy to enter unique ID to each of the initial entries and then have users submit a form where they manually type in the unique id that they are wanting to vote for.

You can then use a COUNTIFS function on the master list of items that can be voted on to count how many form submissions are for that particular unique id.

Elisa Rustenbach

Thank you all! I just finished my voting system today. Love the dashboards and the url did work with a few adjustments

vjschmid

Elisa, I'm wondering if you can share what you did for the voting workaround?

Kyle Thompson

Hi @Andrée Starå

The submission looks at the submissions already entered to the smartsheet in the form?

Couldn't this list get very long?

Kyle