Please let Smartsheet work with time

Genevieve P.

Hey @jappleii

Can you provide more details for what you're looking to do? The Time Function can reference one Text/Number time cell and add hours on to that time to display a different timezone in another column, if that's what you're looking for?

Keep in mind the System Date columns (Created and Modified) will display time based on the user's timezone set in their Personal Settings, if that helps.

kjones3

I agree with these posts - Smartsheet is already calculating time in hours for duration - seems to me that would be the tough part of coding! Now you just need to display it. I would vote for formatting the Date columns to include hours and minutes so that you can see the time a task is scheduled to start and end.

SteCoxy

the ability to track time/duration in a HH:MM:SS format would be so handy for a lot of media organisations for things like slate management, production management, scheduling etc.

Gavin Seaton

Another vote for a Time Column - Would take Smartsheet to the next level. Timesheets, Sign in / Out registers etc.

jappleii

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/comment/397796#Comment_397796

@Genevieve P. I apologize, I had a new member enter my family and lost track of everything.

So, this seems to link to the documentation that the SmartSheets system currently seems to save the timesheet's timezone as whatever user last saved the sheet (which is what I found in the SmartSheet documentation). So, let me give you a very realistic hypothetical for my team:

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We have an event in Vietnam in 2 months, for which we're planning to run backend setup and operations. Our PM's are in Australia, Egypt, and Texas and all 3 are working to coordinate this project with support teams in each region.

For 4 timeslots each day, we will be running 4 rooms of labs per timeslot, for each day. This equals 16 separate setup, run, teardown tasks per day. Our operations teams are in Australia, India, Austria, Portugal, Iowa, and Utah - round the clock, and each team has work to do, and sometimes they need to cover for one another.

In our planning, we have setup, run, and teardown tasks that will be planned according to Vietnam's timezone due to the event, but each PM is coordinating a separate stream of work that applies to when setup needs to run for each room and the organizer/speaker in that room, and assigning it to the operation team that has that task land during their business-day, and how early thethe speaker/organizer(s) need to run through prep on their environment(s) based on what they are doing, and that work needs to be coordinated across.

Onsite at the event we will have a single coordinator PM who will then make sure the tasks that need execution are executed on that specific time and will be running early/late calls with each operations team to ensure setup/teardown are completed on-time according to the needs.

So, that's the use-case.

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What do I need in order to realistically use SmartSheets for this?

1. I need to be able to force a Gantt chart to always use the Timezone of the event for the specifc calculations of time - else the teams in each timezone will not know when their task begins and ends - and we need somewhere we can see that to confirm that all tasks are in Event-localtime, and are thus showing up correctly for the Ops teams in their local time.
2. I need to be able to make sure each Operations team in our FTS setup can see what time each task occurs in their specific timezone as well as localtime.
3. I then need to be able to provide the full Critical path to the event team for the site to ensure that they also know what we need, when, and where, in order to make the event successful.

At this point in time, I can't use Smartsheet for that, so we're back to Google Spreadsheets again.

Does this help explain what I'm requesting?

Joe Goetschel

@jappleii The user's location is easy since that is tied to their personal settings and picking the correct Time zone. This will adjust all system times for that user (Last modified and created dates and times)

As for documenting additional time in a cell, you can do this with Bridge. I had a solution where we needed to capture the exact time due to SLA agreements for response times etc. Basically Location 1 = Time zone 1 and Location 2 = Time zone 2 and so on.

Here is some info on bridge https://www.smartsheet.com/platform/bridge Hope this helps! Let me know if you would like to get on a call to discuss more.

jappleii

Hi, @Joe Goetschel,

I took a look at Bridge - but it's far beyond what I need. According to the SmartSheet documentation I read, the Smartsheet document itself adjusts to match the Timezone of the last EDITOR of the sheet. Which means our PM's in APAC, EMEA, and NA will constantly nuke the intended timezone. That's not going to work.

All I really need is the ability to set a Timezone, with a variable or function that lets me adjust the time to the user's local timezone. And I can't do that currently - I've tested the existing system with my teammates in Australia, India, Europe, US East/Central/West, and Canada, and the systems doesn't handle it because of the current limitations.

Thus why I'm back to spreadsheets again instead of SmartSheets. :(

Joe Goetschel

@jappleii I had an idea and I have validated it works.

You get a baseline time column that will house the current time ( any zone you want) I used Zapier to do this.

You then use the Time Function to set other columns to translate the time to whatever you choose.

Now that you have the time zones, you can live in reports and only choose the timezone you wish etc.

Let me know if you would like help setting this up, my email is below!

jacobrice14

Not sure if this has been added to this field. I utilize smartsheet as an ATS since I am the Senior Recruiter for my company. I input into my sheet the date that I am talking with my candidates, but it would be nice if I could build an automation that would take a date and time from a row, then create a calendar event for Outlook and include attachments from that same row. Would cut down on a decent amount of time for me and prevent from having to jump back and forth between applications.

Joe Goetschel

@jacobrice14 You can use Zapier to create events in Outlook for you when a new row is added. The attachments I know you can go from Outlook to Smartsheet, I would have to validate the other direction.

Cathy Salscheider

Another use case is for support ticket tracking. We track how long a ticket is open along with its priority to determine when to escalate the ticket. We have SLAs ( service level agreements) in place for how quickly a ticket needs to be responded to as well as different levels of escalations and communication times ( it would be great to automate these).

Of course, we would want to do reporting on durations in hours, minutes, seconds (maybe not).

We are looking to replace our current ticketing system, but cannot even consider using SS without have the options to create timestamp columns.

Thanks

Andrée Starå

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/comment/441407#Comment_441407

Hi,

I hope you're well and safe!

Please have a look at my post below with a method I developed.

More info: 

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/68589/lock-or-store-date-value-solution-without-using-zapier

Would that work/help?

I hope that helps!

Be safe, and have a fantastic day!

Best,

Andrée Starå | Workflow Consultant / CEO @ WORK BOLD

✅ Did my comment(s) help/answer your question or solve your problem? Please support the Community and me by marking it - Insightful 💡- Vote Up ⬆️ - Aweseome ❤️ - or/and as the accepted answer. It will make it easier for others to find a solution or help to answer! I appreciate it, thanks!

Jamie Ide

Would be great to have standardization across data!

Paul Newcome

@Cathy Salscheider Here's a method I developed for timestamping specific actions within a sheet. It doesn't provide for a ton of scale, but it does work. Once captured, you can use an INDEX/MATCH or similar to bring the timestamp back over to your original sheet if needed.

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/63561/date-time-stamp-option

Cathy Salscheider

@Paul Newcome Thanks Paul. Creative idea - this could work. Thanks for the idea.