Cross-sheet References - New Unknown Statuses

Vojtech Gajdos

Hi all

We are experiencing strange behavior of cross-sheet references with status showing something we haven't seen before and doesn't appear to be documented: 'Not Shared' or 'Circular'. Also - recently many of cross-sheet reference have become Broken (randomly across all sheets we are using). Is anyone experiencing similar issues and does anyone know what the mentioned Statuses are?

Thanks

Vojtech

Paul Newcome

I suggest reaching out to Support directly. I had some problems with one sheet a couple of weeks ago and had to loop them in, and I believe I have had at least one other user here this week having a similar issue.

Lindsay Whitbread

Hi Vojtech,

Yes I'm seeing this too across a number of sheets. Did you have any luck with support?

Lindsay

Paul Newcome

Support was able to do a "back end refresh" for me, and I haven't had the problem since. Sorry for not including that in my first comment.

Vojtech Gajdos

The problem is that we have this issue across majority of our sheets and so we cannot ask for backend refresh of each of them - that would take us ages, rather would need possibly refreshing all (thousands) of our sheets. They did refresh one (which we sent them as an example) and that was it. The support unfortunately doesn't seem to be very helpful with this issue, with responding taking ages and overall - I must be honest - the help we are getting from them is extremely poor (wondering what your experience is).

SJ Sellers

Hi @Vojtech Gajdos

I have been experiencing this issue starting on Sunday. I spoke with Support on Monday and they said they were aware of this bug and are working to correct it.

I had to go into all the impacted sheets and update the sheet references manually. I originally tried to use "Manage References...." to access the "Sheet Reference Manager" thinking that would show me an inventory of all my references for easy remediation -- but my references weren't even listed there, or had a Status of "Processing". So I had to go into each formula separately and update the reference.

Sometimes, but not always, when I updated one reference to a sheet, some of the other references to that same sheet would start working again.

Debbie Sawyer

I have logged a support call last night with this same issue. I have approx 20 cross sheet references that are used approx 30 times each in a sheet. They were working fine, then Boom, all my cross sheet references have disappeared from the managed references dialog box and all links have been lost (i.e. no blue triangles remaining). My metric sheet is a whole load of error messages. The activity log showed that "Cell link" updated 495 cells to error messages at the time it happened. I put one back in and it worked, but with 30 odd to do, I'd rather they fixed it at the back end if possible.

I have logged the issue with Support and am awaiting a response.

I'll update with whatever response I receive.

Kind regards

Debbie

Paul Newcome

@Debbie Sawyer Did you double check the source sheet? You can remove all cross sheet references from the source sheet itself in just a few clicks. It may be that someone accidentally clicked on the wrong thing.

Andrée Starå

Hi @Vojtech Gajdos @Lindsay Whitbread @SJ Sellers @Debbie Sawyer @Paul Newcome

I hope you're well and safe!

There seems to be a known bug at the moment. Smartsheet is working on solving it.

I hope that helps!

Be safe, and have a fantastic week!

Best,

Andrée Starå | Workflow Consultant / CEO @ WORK BOLD

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Paul Newcome

@Andrée Starå Is this a new one? I saw the one already about the cross sheet references getting broken something to do with lookups and column formulas. I haven't seen anything yet about them just completely disappearing.

Andrée Starå

@Paul Newcome

No, I think it's the same, but it just shows in different ways for different users.

Paul Newcome

@Andrée Starå I thought I had it bad with sheets being broken until I manually opened and saved them. If my cross sheet references started disappearing altogether I would be in some REALLY bad shape.

@Debbie Sawyer Hopefully they're able to get yours resolved quickly. I'd be losing my mind.

Andrée Starå

@Paul Newcome

I was finalizing a client solution yesterday for sales management, and they had multiple Sales Agents, so I had a master one that I copied numerous times.

After I was done and double-checked, I noticed that 3 of the 7 folders had the issue where the references were missing. I deleted the folders and copied them again, and then it worked. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Paul Newcome

@Andrée Starå Some of my stuff is way to spider webbed out into other things to be able to delete and rebuild. Especially the ones I am currently having issues with. The only commonality that I have found so far is that the sheets in question were all created around the same time. Some were copies of another, but some were also built from scratch. They all started showing issues around the same time. Smartsheet was able to do a "back-end refresh" on some of them which fixed the issue, but then others it hasn't worked. Either way I REALLY hope they get this fixed soon.

I just saw another post where they are experiencing something similar but have been unable to reach support for the past two days.

Andrée Starå

@Paul Newcome

Yes, I'm delaying working on some other solutions because of the possible pain of fixing it.

The issue is that the cross-sheet issue, especially VLOOKUP, has been going on for years.

I really hope it gets solved for real soon.

Paul Newcome

@Andrée Starå My problem is that I NEVER use VLOOKUP. It is affecting JOIN and INDEX functions for me.