Problem with Group By Sheet Name - shows old sheet name

Hello Community members,

I want to present team members from several sheets in a single portfolio level dashboard, to show who is a member of what project. The data exists in similarly formatted sheets, one per project, across several projects.

I have a report in which I am grouping by their sheet names. I decided to rename the sheets in order to better clarify what each group meant, since "RACI" is not a term management would be familiar with right now. I replaced "RACI" in the sheet names with "Project Team". Unfortunately, the sheet name appearing in the group by field is still showing the sheet's old name, despite appearing correctly in the Sheet Name field.

I attempted reconfiguring, and even creating a new report from scratch. The screenshot included is of the new report, which itself also shows the old sheet name.

Possible bug?

Any assistance would be appreciated. This is a management deliverable and I need to act quickly, so I may end up creating several brand new sheets as a workaround in the meantime.

Thanks - Josh

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Accepted answers

Josh G

Anyone interested - Support did confirm that is a bug. Meantime, you can work around the issue by simply saving a change to the underlying sheets in the reports. The new file name will appear correctly in the grouping from then on.

All comments

Andrée Starå

Hi @Josh G

I hope you're well and safe!

Is it working now, or do you still have the same result?

Try to refresh, log out/in as well.

Did that work/help?

I hope that helps!

Be safe and have a fantastic week!

Best,

Andrée Starå | Workflow Consultant / CEO @ WORK BOLD

✅Did my post(s) help or answer your question or solve your problem? Please support the Community by marking it Insightful/Vote Up or/and as the accepted answer. It will make it easier for others to find a solution or help to answer!

Josh G

Hi Andrée, thanks for the reply. I did log out/restart browser as requested.

Interestingly, I do see the correct sheet name for one of my sheets, but not for any of the others. So, partially fixed?

I've tried refreshing my session and it hasn't worked in the past, so I still suspect this might be a bug. Curious what may have changed for that one sheet - any insight?

Screenshot of the original report, showing a larger subset of sheet names. Most still incorrectly saying "RACI" where they should say "Project Team", except for the one that I used for the example in my original post, which appears to be correct.

Andrée Starå

@Josh G

Happy to help!

What happens if you test it in another browser, or in incognito/private mode?

Josh G

Unfortunately, no change. I opened the dashboard in another browser that I never use, and am getting the same behavior. Here's a screenshot of the report builder view.

Appreciate any insight you can offer.

Andrée Starå

@Josh G

If you haven’t already, I would recommend that you reach out to the Smartsheet Support Team.

Let me know what you find out.

Josh G

Andrée Starå

@Josh G

Thanks for the update! Good to know!

anuprita

@Josh G. - I changed the name of my sheet, but when I try to update the report that should have refernce cell of my new named sheet, the reference name automatically sticks to old name and then the formula gives "unparsable". In above comment you got confirmation from Smartsheet regarding bug. Do you have a resolution yet? Also, I didn't really understand your workaround, could you please expound?

Josh G

Hi @anuprita, sure happy to help.

It's been a little while so my recall might be a little rusty, but I think I can recall what happened.

I created a report that showed the underlying sheet names in the report itself. I think I was grouping by sheet name, so it was pretty visible. After showcasing it, my stakeholders wanted to change the headers, and renaming the sheets was the quickest way to accomplish that. However, the old names persisted in the report.

Smartsheet support confirmed this was unexpected behavior, and advised me to "prompt" Smartsheet to force the update on the report by simply making a change to the underlying sheets, and hitting save. This had the desired effect, and my new report names started showing up in the report.

I didn't receive "unparsable" - my gut tells me this is an error caused by a malformed formula instead of an application error. It's possible you're experiencing more than one issue at the same time. I suggest simplifying any formulas and fixing the 'old sheet name' issue first, then proceeding to update the formula one step at a time until you get the desired result. Good luck!

1234567Kelly

I am still experiencing the same issue 6/19/2024

ShaRobinson

I just experienced this same issue with Report Grouping not recognizing change to sheet name. How does a bug like this not get fixed after 3.5 years? I just lost 2 hours trying to solve the problem, thinking I was doing something wrong or could fix it myself.

PascalH

We are in July 2025, and this is still a exactly behaving the same (bug still not fixed, old sheet names appearing when renaming with some exceptions though, and preventing proper sorting for a report based on sheet names) !!
I wasted quite some hours on this… is there any support at all on this tool ?

edit: I missed the workaround mentioned in one of the messages: edit and save each sheet then the names get updated. I hope you have edition rights on all of the sheets to be able to pull this off.

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