Control Center Global Update and adding a new external reference

Diane Moore

Is it possible to update the calculation of a cell that includes a new external reference? I was thinking I could use search/replace but not sure since the help materials say that inbound cell links are not supported.

My template set includes sheets, reports and dashboards. What if I just need to replace one of the sheets? Can I do that through global update or do I have reprovision the entire template? I didn't want to do that because there are several dashboard features that needs some manual tweaking after the entire template is provisioned and I just need to update a calculation that includes a new external reference.

Brian_Richardson

I don't think it's possible natively in CC Diane. It's a similar problem that I've bumped into when wanting to push a new cell link out to 150 sheets, it's not possible through Global Updates.

If you have Bridge or another API tool, you could get clever by using the API to create cross sheet references first in your sheets, then use Global Updates to push a Find/Replace update to use the new reference name in a formula.

https://smartsheet.redoc.ly/#operation/add-crosssheet-reference

If I was doing it in Bridge I would probably setup a report that looks for all the sheets that need the new reference. Then in Bridge build a workflow that reads that report, that will provide you with an object that contains the list of sheet ID numbers so you don't have to find them yourself. The next bridge step would be to spin up a child workflow for each sheet ID (put the reference for the list of sheet IDs as the "Number of Runs" value in the child workflow step). The child workflow would then use HTTP to post the new cross sheet reference to the sheet.

Then once you've successfully done that with Bridge, you can use Find/Replace in Global Updates to replace the formulas with the new reference.

Werner Wassermann

Rocket Business Solutions has built an app that can perform numerous updates including cross sheet references, column formulas and other updates to columns multiple sheets at a time that were launched inside and outside of Control Center.

Feel free to reach out to me at werner@atvantage.co.za for demonstration or visit the following link for more details:

https://www.smartsheet.com/marketplace/apps/mission-control