How does smartsheet sort if rows are locked?

Hi.

I want to set up some parent rows on a template to group tasks together. I can't leave this totally open to users because I have an HOURS column against tasks and I want the parent row to roll these hours up. So, I've locked them to prevent users deleting the roll-up formula for this and some other summaries.

How is sort going to work? I can't test this right now, because I am an admin/owner and seem to be able to do what I want, whenever.

Desired behaviour is that the child rows will sort within the grouping of the parent, typically by start date. The grouping rows also contain roll-up dates and if these grouping rows could organise themselves by start date too, that would be good.

This would mean the parent rows are ordered by, in this case, the minimum start date of any task within the parent.

thanks

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Accepted answers

CycleBagEd

Right, I've now been able to check this, and basically it doesn't work as I wanted it to.

A non-admin user can only sort selected rows and although you can insert, delete and move rows which are under a locked row, you can't move a locked row independently.

So, it looks like I have a decision to make between:

a) ditching any kind of useful formulae on the roll-up fields / parents and leaving the parents open to the mercy of my (ab)users

b) advising my users that they can sort within a grouping but then they can't re-arrange that grouping by date

c) ditching any kind of grouping in the template at all and instead insisting that they group their data by another field which they can subsequently sort on

hmmmm it's a shame there's no sort capability in workflow otherwise I might have got around this.

All comments

CycleBagEd

Right, I've now been able to check this, and basically it doesn't work as I wanted it to.

A non-admin user can only sort selected rows and although you can insert, delete and move rows which are under a locked row, you can't move a locked row independently.

So, it looks like I have a decision to make between:

a) ditching any kind of useful formulae on the roll-up fields / parents and leaving the parents open to the mercy of my (ab)users

b) advising my users that they can sort within a grouping but then they can't re-arrange that grouping by date

c) ditching any kind of grouping in the template at all and instead insisting that they group their data by another field which they can subsequently sort on

hmmmm it's a shame there's no sort capability in workflow otherwise I might have got around this.

Angelica

Man, I was hoping I would be able to find a solution as this was the issue I was having as well. I did try option 1 but that did not work out too well!

I do hope smartsheet is able to make this a capability in the future.

CycleBagEd

@Angelica I ditched the idea of having parent formulas on data entry columns.

Instead, data entry columns are strictly data entry and roll-ups are performed on a separate, locked column. This obviously introduces more columns.

My users can now group as they wish, messy as it is. They can sort "good enough" by selecting all the unlocked rows (the top row is locked for overall totals) and sorting, which keeps the grouping (which is some consolation).

details here

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/86649/allocation-percentage-disappears

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