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Populating existing sheet rows through a form

Tim P.
Tim P.
edited 12/09/19 in Archived 2015 Posts

I'm looking to collect weekly sales reports from a number of sales teams spread across different countries. Ideally I want the data from each weeks sales report to drop into a row (with the week number and/or week end date) in my master sheet. Some of the data in the master sheet will be pre-populated (overal targets/budgets etc). Once each report has been submitted, the team should not be able to go back and change prior weeks reports.

 

- Doing this with web forms seems problematic, as each web form submission appears to work by creating a new row, and not by populating an existing one. This means my teams can potentially overwrite some (target) data each week, and are also not forced to use the specific "end of week" or "week of the year" dates we use for our accounting policies

 

- Doing this with sharing rows & using alerts seems an incredible PITA as I would need to manually set up a separate alert, linking it to a different line corresponding to every single week of the year, as otherwise (if I give a regular reminded to update multiple lines) I cant prevent previous data being accessed and overwritten

 

What am I missing here?   Do I just have to live with some pre-populated fields in a web form and trust my users to get it right each week?

 

 

Comments

  • Travis
    Travis Employee
    edited 06/24/15

    Hello, as you have seen, web forms can only be used to submit new rows. You might consider update requests which allow you to send a link for a row or group of rows to anyone to update. Once they have updated the rows, the link will be invalid. Here is more information on update requests: http://help.smartsheet.com/customer/portal/articles/504779-using-update-requests

  • Forms add new rows to a sheet so your users cannot potential overwrite some target data each week.

     

    Structure your master sheet so that new rows are added to the top or bottom of the sheet.  Then you can drag the rows where you want them in your sheet structure.  If your users didn't follow the proper "end of week" date you can send them an update request to fix the row.

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