Data Shuttle - Update Dropdowns - Contact List

gwson

I am able to update the list of email addresses into a destination contact list okay. How do I also update the "Name" field associated with each contact?

Also in situations where the "Name" has been manually updated for each contact email address, it appears that next dropdown update clears out the "name". How do we prevent that?

The goal here is to provide central email/name information to various forms that may require selection of existing personnel etc.

Genevieve P.

Hi @gwson

Currently, DataShuttle can add contact column options that have either a name or an email address, but there isn't a way to add both a name and an email address to a single option in the column properties.

This means that you can use DataShuttle to update Contact column properties to have an email (allowing for automations to recognize this as an email and send out), but there isn't a way to automatically add the name at the same time.

Please submit your feedback to our Product Team by using this form, here!

As an alternative, if you have a reference sheet in your account that has all Contact listed (one column for names, one for emails), then you could use DataShuttle to only pull in the Name for the form selection drop-down. Then in the underlying sheet you could use cross-sheet formulas to automatically pull in the Contact type of value in another column, using the name as a unique value to search for in the reference sheet. Would this work for you?

Cheers,

Genevieve

amhba

I was getting very frustrated trying to do this. I have a workaround that gives me more "friendly" names along with email addresses, which is helpful as my dataset contains a lot of people with potentially confusingly similar email addresses.

EDIT: NOTE: This does NOT seem to work to allow multi-select fields to be populated on forms or Update requests, but the fields will hold multi-select values that can be completed in Dynamic View and directly in the sheet.

Step 1: Set up your source file to contain three columns:

Name | Email | Name and email formula | Contact

The "name and email" should be populated in Excel like this:

=a2&"<"&b2&">" (and then fill to the bottom of the dataset)

or in a Smartsheet column formula like this:

=Name@row + " <" + Email@row + ">"

Step 2: Set up your destination Sheet to have at least one Contact List column.

Step 3: Use DataShuttle (offload then upload) to map and populate those column dropdowns (I have several sheets with multiple contact lists).

Step 4: Edit Column Properties for each column, convert it to a Dropdown list column type, hit OK, then edit the Column Properties again and convert it back to Contact List then click OK. DO NOT SAVE THE SHEET BETWEEN THESE SUB-STEPS. Make sure to select "Allow multiple contacts per cell" if you have existing data you want to keep and/or if you are using multiple contacts per cell.

I hope this helps someone else out there. Of course, make backups before you try this.

amhba

Update: The issue with multiple-contact fields seems to have been a browser caching error. Cleared cache and it works fine now.