How to send a notification to a selected recipient

When you add a name to a field in a web form it is formatted as text - not as a contact, even if its added to a Contact List field. There is not a way to link entered names to a contact. This means there isn’t a function that email the user who was entered in the web form. However, there are a couple workarounds you might consider using. 

Rather than selecting or entering a name, have the user enter or select the email address of the supervisor and use Zapier to email the entered email address. Zapier is an online tool that uses our API to perform automated actions. You could set up a ‘Zap’ which sends the contents of the row to an entered email address when a row is added to your sheet (new web form entry). 

You could also create a report for each supervisor that shows all the rows assigned to them. Reports are always up to date with the latest information from your sheets, are editable, and can be set to be emailed to a user on a recurring basis. 

Here is information on creating reports: http://help.smartsheet.com/customer/portal/articles/522214-creating-reports

Bob Payton - can you elaborate on this? 

I have been asked to set up a SmartSheet to submit specific items for approval.  There could be 20 people entering items to this sheet.

I can have the notifications sent to the "approver" every time a new item is added. (there is only one of those)

What I would like to do is to send an email back to the person who entered the specific item when the "approver" marks the item approved.  Each person get notification only when their own items is marked approved.

I don't want all 20 people who would be entering issues to get everyone's approval.. that will be email overload.

Any ideas?

Thank you

Teresa Meyer - my problem stems from the line being populted from a web form (so that we have availability to all employees,not just Smartsheet users).  If you have regular USERS updating line items, you could have the "Approver" be a Contact List, then a Reminder could be sent to that dynamic listing (might need a due date or other date column to trigger the reminder). [also, if SS is monitoring this thread, why don't System dates (created, modified) count as Dates for reminder triggers?].  I agree with Sasha that Reports are great to aggrigate action items from multiple SS, but Alerts are not available from Reports to automatically trigger, and the Scheduling of an e-mail turns the report into a PDF, so now you have to go back into SS.  Seems every corner we turn there is just one link missing to make this work!

Bob - reminders can only be set on Date column - not system columns (such as Created/Modified Date). You could add a Date column to your sheet and reference the corresponding System Column which will display the date and can be used with reminders. If your Created (Date) column is called Created, then use this formula in a Date column (row 1):

=Created1 

Couple things to note. You cannot add formulas to a Date column associated with dependencies (Start and End Date for example).  Reminders are only sent if they are scheduled at least one day in the future. This means, if you use the formula above for reminders, you will want to add additional days to the result. If you want to add one day (send reminder 1 day after the row was created), use this:

=Created1 + 1

@Bevan,

Thanks for the info. However, Zaps only appear to work with Outlook/Office 365 and not Outlook Exchange or OWA.

The Zapier support site mentions allowing excahnge to work by whitelisting the Zapier IP address, however, I'm at a state agency and that will never happen or will take months to get approved.

Tim