Contact list "allow multiple contacts per view" & Card view

Max_D. · 10/12/18

Hi community,

I am facing a problem with a specific sheet and can't find a suitable solution. Every helping hand is really appreciated.

What's happening?

I have a sheet where our colleagues are listing their projects. There is a row for the name of the project leader. This row is defined as "Dropdown list" with the setting "Restrict to dropdown values only". The cool thing is, that when I switch to "Card view" I can use the button "view by project leader" to sort the card and see how much projects (viewed as cards) every project leader is doing.

So far so good.

The "problem"

Sometimes we have more than one project leader. Since the last update there is the great function "Contact list" and the setting "allow multiple contacts per cell". So now I can assign several people to one project.

BUT:

If I add multiple contacts per cell I can't anymore "view by project leader" in the card view. Am I simply missing something or is that not working?

Thanks for your help!

Best regards

Max

Andrée Starå · 10/12/18

Hi Max,

I think there is an issue at the moment because of how Smartsheet handles single or multi contacts. They are treated as two different column types. I'll update my post if I find the information about it.

I hope this helps you!

Best,

Andrée Starå

Workflow Consultant @ Get Done Consulting

Daniel Stein · 10/12/18

Hi Max,

You are correct that only single-contact columns will appear as lane options in card view. If you want to use your "Project Leader" field as a lane in card view, I would suggest leaving it as a single-contact column in all of your sheets. You could add a second column called "Project team members" (and turn on "Allow multiple contacts per cell" in that column) in order to track any additional people. That way, you always have a single leader that you can show in card view & can add as many additional team members as you want in the other column.

For context, we don't currently allow multi-contact fields as lanes, because there isn't as clear a way to visualize these lanes in card view that would be unambiguous and useful for customers. That said, we'd love to know how you would expect this to work. For a card that's assigned to multiple people, would you expect the card to appear multiple times, under each person's lane? Or would you expect there to be a separate lane for each permutation of assignees, e.g., Person A, Person B, Person A & Person B (though this could lead to quite a few permutations with more people)? Or something else?

Best regards,

Daniel

agigli1 · 10/12/18

Daniel,

Like Max, I immediately desired the same functionality. My use case is nearly identical to his. With my company, we keep a "Master Project List" sheet which lists out all of our projects and includes information like status, budget, duration, and project engineer. Many of our projects involve multiple team members and I would love to see all the projects for each team member in the card lane view. My team is 8 people and this view would give me a quick idea of whose doing what and whether they are overloaded or not. I've always wanted to list multiple people under the "Project Engineer" column and when I realized that you guys had recently added the functionality, I immediately proceeded to try the card lane view only to be disappointed that it's not compatible.

My suggestion is this. If a contact list column contains more than one person, just duplicate the card and include it in the lane for each person. If the information on the card is edited for one person, then it changes for the other persons as well. In the end, you're just representing the same card under multiple people. Definitely, do not do the permutations. That would be quite a mess!

Thanks!

Tony

Max_D. · 10/29/18

Hey Daniel,

thanks for your quick answer.

I've changed our sheet as you suggested and it works just fine. Your solution is also more sufficient, because additional team members are shown as little circles with initials in card view.

Thanks for you help and best regards,

Max

lstoeber · 11/30/18

Totally agree! The task or 'card' should show under the lane for each person. The idea is that you can see what each person is assigned to in the card view, so having the task cards duplicated makes sense. I just spent a ton of time creating a task list using the multiple contacts option only to find out that the one view I was looking for (card view by person) was not an option. Now I have to try to figure out a different way to replicate what I have in Smartsheet in a manual way to show a grid by person. I often need this type of view which isn't meant to do true resource allocation calculations, just a view of who is working on what.

lstoeber · 11/30/18

This option is only helpful if you have one project lead and don't care about a card view that shows each team member and all the tasks they are working on. I have had to abandon Smartsheet for many of my projects because of the inability to assign multiple contacts. I was thrilled to see this as a recent enhancement, but am now blocked by the inability to use the card view. Would love to see a solution where each team member has a lane and tasks show under each and every person they are assigned to. This would duplicate the cards, but makes sense for this use case.

Andrée Starå · 11/30/18

Hi,

Great idea! Please submit an Enhancement Request when you have a moment.

Have a fantastic weekend!

Best,

Andrée Starå

Workflow Consultant @ Get Done Consulting

tim.palmer72816 · 12/18/18

I am currently evaluating smartsheet s a project management solution for my company. The lack of functionality described above is a deal breaker for me.

Andrée Starå · 12/18/18

Hi Tim,

Can you describe what you are lacking in functionality because it might be working now?

There have been updates after this thread started.

I hope this helps you!

Have a fantastic week!

Best,

Andrée Starå

Workflow Consultant @ Get Done Consulting

John Tran · 09/10/20

Hello, as others have mentioned, enabling card view for multiple assigned member is absolutely critical for my team. The suggestion of simply duplicating the card when associated with multiple assignments will be very helpful. Do we have an update on whether this is considered for development?

Thanks!

John

Norbert T · 11/11/21

Hello. I have this exact problem and i'm trying to figure out a way around but can't seem too.... many of our projects have couple of leads and multiple "active" members, "support" members, etc... so the "allow multiple contacts" is perfect for listing all team members names in the cell, but i can't seem to figure out a way to build any sort of reporting by NAME, i.e. understand where every person is involved and at what level. Dealing with a team of 100 employees here, so any sort of suggestion would be amazing... Reports don't work, dashboard dont, and card view either...

Any option? Anyone?

Genevieve P. · 11/11/21

Hi @Norbert T

What about creating a Metric sheet where each person is listed in a single cell running down one column, then you could use a COUNTIF formula with HAS to count how many times that one contact is listed in one sheet? You can have multiple columns with a different COUNTIF per sheet, and then a final column with totals if you want to see involvement across all sheets.

Tim Starkey · 03/02/22

This has been around a while, but adding my two cents. Its not just the lanes in card view, but also any sorting or grouping does not work with multiple contact fields. To be honest, I do not have a strong preference one way or the other (having a row duplicated under each contact, or having a grouping/card/sort that uses all the contacts), but I would at least like it to do something. In our situation, we have a column for team lead, and a column for team members. I cannot pull any useful reports that group or sort based on the team member column. I will submit an enhancement request, but would like to see more discussion on this to hear ideas. Thanks!

DaveM · 04/21/22

Has anyone found a solution for this yet?

Our company also has run into this issue and I'm disappointed to see that after over 3 years Smartsheet has not addressed it. Duplicating the cards (while not duplicating rows in the table) would make the most sense for us because the main use-case is to see all the projects assigned to each team member while also comparing across team members.

Smartsheet is advertised as a robust task management solution but I'm perplexed by this limitation. I can't imagine it would be that hard to have the same card show up in multiple lanes despite originating from one row in the table. It looks like this flaw was brought up over 3 years ago and still hasn't been addressed. Is there any plan to add this functionality?

Contact list "allow multiple contacts per view" & Card view

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