Copying Entire Sheets to New Locations, Keeping Cell History Time Stamps

alano10

Is there an easier way to move entire sheets with data, comments, and attachments to new sheets in workspaces housed elsewhere without overriding the cell history's thread showing all changes made to said cells? The Save as New template option moves everything over, but it erases the cell's history and overrides it with the date of the template's creation.

Genevieve P.

Hi @alano10

Cell history is specific to the original sheet that houses the history so it won't carry over when you Save as New (as you've found). Could you create a copy and leave the new copy in the original place, and move to old sheet to the new location?

Cheers,

Genevieve

Genevieve P.

Hi @alano10

Cell history is specific to the original sheet that houses the history so it won't carry over when you Save as New (as you've found). Could you create a copy and leave the new copy in the original place, and move to old sheet to the new location?

Cheers,

Genevieve

alano10

@Genevieve P. Thanks so much for the insight! Creating a template and/or copy of the original, then moving the original sheet retains the cell's history, and works for my specific application.

ds2024

hi @Genevieve P. can you guide how I can copy sheet that preserves cell history and formula?

Genevieve P.

Hi @ds2024

The suggestion above is to save the sheet as new:

Then keep using the current (original) sheet to retain cell history. The copied version would be a new version with new data. Does that make sense?

Ashley F

Hi @Genevieve P.

I wish I had known of this limitation before copying the sheet to archive 5000+ rows of data and deleting the archived data from the original master sheet.

This solution wouldn't really work for us as we have hundreds of reports, dashboards and metric sheets that are all connected to the main sheet and we need to have all of the cell history for every single row both in the master and the archived file.

We had automations set up to move rows to the archive automatically every quarter based on certain criteria, but back in December, all of the move automations stopped working (not sure if it was because of the amount of data to be moved or what).

Are there any other solutions?

Isaac A.

Hi @Ashley F !

As previously mentioned cell history is directly linked to the original sheet where it was created, so it won’t carry over when you use "Save as New" or create a copy of the sheet.

I've come across a similar idea in this post: "Option to duplicate a sheet and retain Change History." I encourage you to vote for this idea to help it get implemented.

Regarding the issue with your automations, could you please provide more context? Are there any error messages, or did the workflows simply stop moving rows? Screenshots would be helpful if available.

Cheers,

Isaac.