Best Practices- Creating new smartsheets on annual campaigns and events

LMW654
LMW654 ✭✭
edited 09/13/23 in Smartsheet Basics

Hi There IT Professionals,

I'm still a bit of a newbie since I've only been using smartsheets over the past year. So I wanted to reach out to smartsheet experts like yourselves, to see if there are recommendations on some best practices that I could share with my team at my association on how they can go about easily creating a new smartsheet for events/campaigns that we manage annually.

In the past my team has used the 'Save As' feature to retitle a previous smartsheet that we managed for one of our annual events to capture important historical details like previous year deadlines, attachments and etc to use as reference points. This approach has seemed to work for the most part, but we have found that it causes some confusion with current year campaigns since not all notes, assigned individuals and etc. are completely cleared out or updated from prior year campaigns.

Do you have any best practices or recommendations that should be done when updating or freshening up a smartsheet that is for an annual campaign or event that can avoid these outdated details and/or confusion?

Best Answer

  • David Tutwiler
    David Tutwiler Overachievers Alumni
    Answer ✓

    Hello LMW, and welcome to the community!

    I have found that the Archiving sheets like this has worked very well for us. We keep several annual sheets (anything from metrics tracking to survey information that we need to refresh each year) and we archive the data each year.

    To do that, we create a new sheet in the format of "[Sheet Name] Archive [Year]". Then we go into the master sheet and set up a workflow that on January 1st (or whatever date you want to set) any row with a date in the past will trigger the "Move Row" action and move to the newly created Archive sheet.

    Let me know if you have questions about this or if you want to set up a test. I could share screenshots of the Workflow if you need it.

Answers

  • David Tutwiler
    David Tutwiler Overachievers Alumni
    Answer ✓

    Hello LMW, and welcome to the community!

    I have found that the Archiving sheets like this has worked very well for us. We keep several annual sheets (anything from metrics tracking to survey information that we need to refresh each year) and we archive the data each year.

    To do that, we create a new sheet in the format of "[Sheet Name] Archive [Year]". Then we go into the master sheet and set up a workflow that on January 1st (or whatever date you want to set) any row with a date in the past will trigger the "Move Row" action and move to the newly created Archive sheet.

    Let me know if you have questions about this or if you want to set up a test. I could share screenshots of the Workflow if you need it.