Combine Contacts from multiple columns into a single cell
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Hi @Karim Khan
Do you use Control Center/Data Mesh? Or are you on Core Smartsheet?
Joe Goetschel | Smartsheet Director | SCS CLOUD - Smartsheet Partner
"The only real limitation of Smartsheet is the level of effort required to achieve your goal."
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@Olen Ronning I would love to have this feature to aggregate contact columns in a Control Center intake sheet for use in WorkApp.
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I would like the ability to concatenate multiple contact type fields into a single contact type field. The new process would need to have the ability to perform on both single select and multi-select contact column types.
Example:
For meeting attendance, I want to have 3 fields: Required, Optional, Informed
I want all 3 of the contents of those fields merged into one field [Assigned To].
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@chrisstrubemohawk, that is a great idea. If it is handled by a cell formula, we could build our own logic to allow this merge to be dynamic, depending on other conditions in our sheet data as well.
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Yes, I'm thinking of a few types of formulas based on the functions I have seen in Smartsheet so far.
=CONTACTMRGS([List 1]@row, [List 2]@row, etc.) for a situation where lists are a single selection.
=CONTACTMRGM([List 1]@row, [List 2]@row, etc.) for those rows that are multi select.
Of course, there have to be rules around it. The receiving Contacts column must already be properly configured to receive the possible selections. Or maybe the receiving column can't have the "Restrict to List Values Only" turned on. The how-to gets hairy very quickly. I hope it can be done.
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You have NO idea how helpful this would be.
The inability to combine contact lists is such a massive headache.
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Yes!
Although multiple selection contacts are captured as an array, they are presented as text and only work like text. This is a problem for multiple selection dropdowns too. Smartsheet has the data in array format in the backend (accessible via API) so let's have a couple of basic functions that let us get at it as an array.
Combining two or more email addresses with a delimeter like ; is a no-brainer for managing automation.
For a specific use case:
We have a task list for each of our customer implementation team's projects In that task list, there are certain key milestones/tollgates that need approval. The group of approvers is based on a number of conditions, primarily revenue level. Higher levels of revenue mean more people are combined into an approval group. Additionally, region/country plays a big role. We use groups of approvers at each approval stage to ensure that approvals happen as quickly as possible and don't bottleneck at any one person.
So for example, a Level 1 revenue project may need to have 2 people from the Region and 1 person from the Global team combined into the initial approval contact column to be sent an approval request.
We could setup a reference sheet with pre-set combinations of approvers, but the number of possible combinations of variables is in the hundreds if not thousands.
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As an alternative implementation, "groups" could be used for this. If in a multiple contacts column you could select groups, they would be a great way to handle row-level relevance filters, even beyond the 20 contacts currently possible in a cell. I can imagine this being rather a new column type.
