Contact Field Listing Multiple Contacts to Feed Individual Rows in a Report

StephanieWW

Is it possible to parse out a contact field with multiple contacts into a report or new sheet listing each contact on its own row? If that is not possible, can you do the reverse? I hope this makes sense.

Genevieve P.

Hi @StephanieWW

No, there currently isn't a way to parse out a multi-select cell into individual rows/cells automatically.

Contacts are also a specific type of value, so you can't use a formula to take separate contact values and have it appear into a multi-select cell as multiple contacts - the formula will combine the "display name" into the cell, which translates the contacts into Text.

Would you be able to describe your process a little more? If you're looking to Report on Contacts, I would suggest keeping the column to be Single-Select so that you can use the Grouping feature in Reports.

Cheers,

Genevieve

Genevieve P.

Hi @StephanieWW

No, there currently isn't a way to parse out a multi-select cell into individual rows/cells automatically.

Contacts are also a specific type of value, so you can't use a formula to take separate contact values and have it appear into a multi-select cell as multiple contacts - the formula will combine the "display name" into the cell, which translates the contacts into Text.

Would you be able to describe your process a little more? If you're looking to Report on Contacts, I would suggest keeping the column to be Single-Select so that you can use the Grouping feature in Reports.

Cheers,

Genevieve

StephanieWW

Thanks, Genevieve for the fantastic explanation. It makes sense. I am working on building out my project charter process and would love for the identified stakeholders to feed into a stakeholder communication plan. I think I have figured out a workaround by linking the stakeholder communication plan into the Charter intake sheet. Then I display a stakeholder list from the communication plan in the charter dashboard. My main goal with any of this is to reduce duplicate data entry.

Genevieve P.

Sounds like you've managed to link it all quite well! 🙂

Paul Johnson1

Hi, I see that there has been a request to allow contact columns with " Allow Multiple contacts per cell" to appear in a report for quite a few years now. However this has not been remedied as yet.

We are using the report feature for contacts to have a report per dept showing each members assignmentsin all project plans. However as all of our plans have multiple contact columns there is nothing showing in the report.

If I change the plan to have a single contact column then the report picks this up.

Can you help please as this is an urgent request .

Regards

Paul Johnson

Genevieve P.

Hi @Paul Johnson1

Contact Columns that have single select or multi-select are both able to be pulled into a Report. However a multi-select column is seen as a different type of column than it's single select counterpart.

This means that you may need to select two columns in your Report column picker to ensure both columns are showing across all your sheets: any of the sheets that have a single select, and all of the columns that have multi-select. Even if the names are the same, the properties are different so they cannot be "combined" in a Report. Does that make sense?

Cheers,

Genevieve

Teresa Drury

I have a similar need. I have a project plan template with multi-select contacts in the "Assigned To" column, because a task may be assigned to multiple resources. The template contains generic contacts. I have another sheet that is used to request resources for the project from the resource manager. When the resource is assigned and added to the resource sheet, I want to use VLOOKUP to update the project plan with the named resource. This works great when there is only on generic contact in the Assigned To column. But does not work when there are multiple generic contacts. We are currently having to use find/replace to update the generic contacts.

Genevieve P.

Hi @Teresa Drury

Yes, a VLOOKUP can only find matches if the cell contains an exact match, it can't parse out individual values and search for them one at a time. You would need a reference sheet that has all possible combinations to match against in this instance.

Depending on how many Contacts you have, another option would be to use the Assign People workflow to add the contact based on the content that was selected, see: Assign People in an Automated Workflow

Cheers,

Genevieve