Using the Smartsheet meeting template without having to update each date manually

tsuranyi

We are using the Smartsheet meeting template, but the annoying part is, before the next meeting, I have to manually update the date beside each agenda topic in order to trigger the form to work. Is there a better way to do this, so either only update one date in the future, or have it auto-calculate the date and populate each of these lines?

Tomasz Giba

Hi @tsuranyi

If you are looking to have the same date in all the children's rows as the parent row use:

=PARENT()

formula in all children rows of the date column:

Is this what you need?

tsuranyi

Thank you, Tomasz. I'm trying to make this as hands-off as possible for our team, so just wondering if there is a way that, everytime someone adds a line, it automatically will have the =parent() populated for that line?

Tomasz Giba

Hi @tsuranyi

There are 2 ways to do it, unfortunately both are imperfect :( but maybe still can be useful for you.

The first one will work via automated copy formula Smartsheet feature.

So the formula is automatically copied to rows if rows are added between two rows that have this formula:

So both rows in a date column (green) have =PARENT() formula in

After you add a line by clicking on the last row (yellow) and insert line above it will automatically insert =PARENT() in that row in Date column.

It will work for all other middle rows:

In the screen shot above I added rows above green rows and dates in yellow were just automatically copied there.

Unfortunately if someone will add a row above the first line or as a last line this will not work so the downside of this solution is that is not error proof.

The second solution is by adding one more column for taping dates in parent rows only:

In this example I entered this column formula into Date column:

=IF(COUNT(CHILDREN(Topic@row)) > 0, [Type Meeting Date]@row, PARENT())

The downside of this solution is that you can put dates only into Type Meeting Date column in parent rows (highlighted purple) and also it may be confusing to have two dates columns.

There is also a third solution by creating a report that will list all added rows and no date and manually add =PARENT() formula.

This could be combined with 1-st solution to just add formula to rows that have been incorrectly added.

I hope you can use some of this! Good Luck!