Did the COUNT formula change to include blank?

Gissel · 01/19/22

I want the COUNT formula to only count checked boxes. Yesterday, this was the way the formula worked today, it counts checked and unchecked boxes.

Does anyone have any idea why this changed?

Genevieve P. · 01/20/22

Hi all,

It's expected that un-checked boxes should be Counted in the Summary COUNT in a Report so that you can Group by if the boxes are checked or not, then apply a Summary to both sets of Groupings:

Screen Shot 2022-01-20 at 2.33.02 PM.png

This way you can see in your Grouping that 7 boxes are un-checked. If you don't want to see any rows with un-checked boxes in your Report, you can use the Filter option to remove those rows from the view. See: Use Filters on Reports

Cheers,

Genevieve

Jeff Reisman · 01/19/22

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/86689/did-the-count-formula-change-to-include-blank

That IS really weird. That's the way I remember it as well.

Just change to use COUNTIF instead.

=COUNTIF(CheckboxColumn:CheckboxColumn, =1)

Gissel · 01/19/22

Thanks @Jeff Reisman

The "summarize" function in the report only has the COUNT formula.

Jeff Reisman · 01/19/22

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/comment/316645#Comment_316645

Aha. In that case, you may have to add a helper column to convert your checked checkboxes to a text or numeric value, and then count those in your report summary.

=IF(Checkbox@row, "Checked", "")

Amy Desiderio · 01/20/22

I think the issue is that SmartSheet needs to look at this. I have 50 reports that now do not work like they worked just 2 days ago. So there is a problem or something isn't working correctly on Smartsheet's end. I can't go in and change or add workarounds to that many reports. I've registered the issue in an issue report but haven't heard back.

Genevieve P. · 01/20/22

Hi all,

It's expected that un-checked boxes should be Counted in the Summary COUNT in a Report so that you can Group by if the boxes are checked or not, then apply a Summary to both sets of Groupings:

This way you can see in your Grouping that 7 boxes are un-checked. If you don't want to see any rows with un-checked boxes in your Report, you can use the Filter option to remove those rows from the view. See: Use Filters on Reports

Cheers,

Genevieve

Amy Desiderio · 01/22/22

Hi, I did get a response back from the help desk at SmartSheet finally acknowledging that this was an actual issue and only certain accounts were impacted. So I presume if others are finding the same issue, that they should file a problem report. Thanks!

Gissel · 01/24/22

Thank you @Amy Desiderio

Gissel · 02/02/22

Hi @Amy Desiderio , I opened a case, but no luck. I was informed by Smartsheet that the formula is working as expected. Was this issue fixed for you? I still have the same issue. -Thanks.

Kyla Ratchford · 06/28/22

I am experiencing the same and finding it extremely frustrating - I want to get a report summary count of checked boxes ONLY and expected the report to do that for me but it is counting all associated rows.

@Gissel @Amy Desiderio were either of you able to get a response about this issue?

Amy Desiderio · 06/29/22

It did change sometime back in Jan/Feb, but the response I received was that when it only counted checked boxes previously it was actually a bug and they fixed the bug so now it counts all boxes which still doesn't work for any use cases I have. So I had to apply a formula in the sheets to count if they were checked or unchecked so I could do the easy comparison without having to have separate groups and summaries. @Gissel @Kyla Ratchford

Kyla Ratchford · 06/30/22

@Amy Desiderio thank you for your response. This was a similar response that I received after connecting with Smartsheet Support. The response was as follows:

After engaging additional resources regarding your scenario, this is the expected behavior, where the report counts each checkbox, whether it's checked or not. I've submitted an Enhancement Request to our product team and they will look into adding the ability to count only checked cells in a report. You can also submit an Enhancement Request and track product updates in this Help Center article: Track product updates or make an enhancement request.

As an alternate solution, I think the best solution would be to create a new metrics sheet and use COUNTIF formulas to pull data from the source sheet to count the checked cells for each column.

I am surprised that this is the "expected behaviour" considering that the attempt is to summarize that field, which for me would be to inform about how many boxes are checked. But at least an enhancement request was submitted and hopefully we'll see a change in the summary behaviour at some point soon!!

Did the COUNT formula change to include blank?

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