When importing Excel in a sheet - Entire work is lost despite saving

Pascale Ropert

Hello,

Has anybody experienced this issue in Smartsheet.

I imported an Excel spreadsheet into a sheet - worked in it for one hour and saved regularly.

The next day, I go into the sheet and none of the data ie the entire import has disappeared. The sheet is blank.

I am able to recreate the issue, I import again, make a change and save the sheet.

I exit and come back in, no data. Am I missing something?

And my back up file has no data either...

Thank you!

Pascale

Genevieve P.

Hi @Pascale Ropert

Importing an Excel file into Smartsheet will create a new sheet each time. It sounds like you may have created a sheet in Smartsheet first, then used Import to bring in data. Since this creates a new item, your original Smartsheet sheet will stay blank.

See: Import Files to Create New Sheets

If you want to update the same sheet with new excel data, you'll want to copy/paste directly into the sheet instead.

See: Tips for using copy and paste

Cheers,

Genevieve

Pascale Ropert

Thank you Genevieve.

I recreated the issue and ended up saving the sheet as a new one (Save as), that way I do not need to copy and paste, which is tedious for documents with more than 500 lines.

Losing my original work was a bad surprise because one would expect the sheet to be able to save the data or generate some form of message warning you that the data will be lost unless you "Save as" under a new document.

I did some research in the online help and did not find any information about this either.

Kind regards,

Pascale

Graham Gould Maule

Hey @Pascale Ropert - I found this thread because I was experiencing the same issue. You may have noticed this too, however when the sheet is imported it actually doesn't delete, it instead just moves to the Main Sheets page and is available there. So if you click out of the sheet you thought the data should be in, navigate to the main files page, and search, you should find the sheet with all the imported and saved data. That sheet can then be moved or worked off of and all the data is still there.

Graham

Cassandra

Graham, thank you for your comment - you have just saved me a lot of heartache.

pdclark

This is helpful to see that the import creates a new sheet, but does not solve the issue for me. I need to import to a sheet monthly, and I reference that specific sheet in other sheets and reports. Is there a way to import into the existing sheet? Copying and pasting does not work for me.

Genevieve P.

Hi @pdclark

If your plan has access to it, the Data Shuttle add-on can import data from an external source directly into one sheet. Here's more information: About Data Shuttle

Cheers,

Genevieve

ker9

You could possibly use a workflow to copy (or move) the rows from the new sheet to the existing sheet.

https://help.smartsheet.com/learning-track/smartsheet-intermediate/move-and-copy-rows

Dale Callaway

Graham,

I found your response from a year ago and this was very helpful. I'm in the midst of deploying a new document management management system at our company and tracking the conversion to new templates via Excel has been a bit cumbersome (multiple people using the same workbook is impossible unless in Sharepoint).