How to Mask Circular Reference and Blocked Errors?

Justin Gibbemeyer
edited 08/04/21 in Smartsheet Basics

I have a SmartSheet that I have that references a Cell that calculates employee capacity. I created two cells that reference it, one is a point value, the other is a cell that calculates the percentage of the Employee Capacity cell.

Employee Capacity -------------------> Action / Task Hours <---------------> Percentage of Employee Capacity

The above are an example of the Cells.

So the idea is that a user can entire either a specific Task hour amount and the Percentage cell will calculate the percentage of the employees total capacity, OR they can enter a specific Percentage in, and the Task Hours will automatically calculate.


For example, if an employee has 100 hours of capacity, and they enter in a task that takes 3 hours, I want it to calculate in the third field it is 3% of total employee capacity, or vice versa, if they enter in 3% in the Percentage field, the Task Hour will automatically calculate and show 3 hours.


While the circular reference was intentional to allow users the freedom to enter either or information, I have a cell that adds up all the entries that will not calculate due to unused fields showing a circular reerence error and the sum field cant compute this.

Is there a way to mask the error so the cell remains blank until someone enters data into one of the two fields?


Thanks!

Answers