1 cell to many

Mtmoroni

I have a Master sheet where there is 1 cell with a multi-select that a user could choose a number of items. While I can reference that Cell, and wrap text to make it look like a list. I am ideally looking to see if I can break that cell into many cells.

List column cell is "=[Multi Select]@row" with 'Wrap' on

I'm in need of taking the Multi Select cell and break it down like the Individual column is.

Nik Fuentes

The issue here is that smartsheet recognizes a Multiselect Dropdown column as a single text string. It doesn't see it as "Apple" "Banana" "Orange" "Pineapple", but rather as "Apple Banana Orange Pineapple." If it was the former, we could treat it as an array and use an INDEX() function to pull out individual pieces from it, but it's text, so we're stuck with a much more limited set of tools. Outside of using a tangled mess of LEFT(), MID(), and RIGHT() functions to extract varying portions of the text, or failing that making it multiple single select columns, I think you're fresh out of luck friend; unless somebody else knows something I don't.

I can help you with a text solve, or you could throw a feature request to Smartsheet and hope they get to it sometime in the next few years. either way [or another], best of luck friend.

Mtmoroni

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/comment/302570#Comment_302570

Thank you. I totally LOLd at ".."could throw a feature request to Smartsheet and hope they get to it sometime in the next few years."

Also, its odd that Smartsheet sees that cell as 1 long text, but if you put wrap on, it still outputs as a list.

Andrée Starå

Hi @Mtmoroni & @Nik Fuentes,

I hope you're well and safe!

The multi-select values are spit by CHAR(10), so you can use that to split the values.

Make sense?

Would that work/help?

Also, If you want to combine values to a multi-select, you'd use the CHAR(10).

I hope that helps!

Be safe and have a fantastic day!

Best,

Andrée Starå | Workflow Consultant / CEO @ WORK BOLD

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Mtmoroni

@Andrée Starå Thank you! Now, any clue how to use the char(10) knowledge to split a text string based on the Char(10)?

Nik Fuentes

Hey @Andrée Starå, any chance you could whip up a quick example of how that would look in a formula? The description for CHAR() is more than a little vague and I'm not sure how one would go about using this in this case. If CHAR(10) is a line-break/return-carriage, it's still just a text string, albeit one spanning multiple lines, just like using Ctrl+Enter/Cmnd+Return in a text cell.