We have some big sheets with a lot of complicated cross-sheet formulas and cell links. We use reports, pivots, and dashboards to collate and summarize data. Recently, we've had a few incidents where a sheet loading slowly (apparently) causes things to malfunction. A dashboard metric will appear as "#CIRCULAR REFERENCE", or a pivot output wil be full of "#INVALID REF", or a report will appear empty because suddenly none of the source sheets' rows match the criteria. From what I've heard from Smartsheet support so far, it seems like this is what's happening:
- Formulas and cell links take a long time to load
- While they are loading, the cells are populated with error messages
- Those error messages are interpreted as actual data by Pivot, report filtering, and other sheets’ cross-sheet formulas
The error messages are interpreted as actual cell edits in the activity log too:
This seems like a huge problem! I don't mind if a sheet is slow to load from the UX perspective, but if the slowness is corrupting our data, even temporarily, that's a real problem. Has anyone else experienced this? Does Smartsheet have a plan to address it?
