Multi-Select Dropdown Update

Kara Lumley · 10/01/19

Smartsheet Community,

Here at Smartsheet, we use Smartsheet for pretty much everything. We are acutely aware (mostly) of the pain points and missing functionality that you, our valued Community members, discuss here as well.

The inability to select multiple options from a dropdown column has been one of the most agonizing, irritating, functional gaps when using Smartsheet.

Over the past 7 months, our team of development engineers, plus ux experts, quality assurance engineers, and product, used Smartsheet to coordinate impeccable timing with almost every other internal team at Smartsheet, including mobile, automation, forms, and reporting, to deliver some long-awaited news.

I’m very very pleased to announce a brand new column, available to everyone, today.

In the column options, you'll find Dropdown (Multi Select).

Thank you for your patience, user stories, and feedback.

Here's a link to the help article: https://help.smartsheet.com/articles/2480081-dropdown-list-column-type

Thank you,

Kara

Chuck Muirhead · 10/01/19

I have already put it to good use. One suggestion though, on the webforms, we have the option to show drop-down lists as radio buttons. Can this also be made available for the multi-select drop-down?

Mike Wilday · 10/01/19

Or at least horizonal check boxes rather than radio buttons. Radio buttons tend to be a single choice option. But having the options lined out as check boxes would be very visually appealing.

Please submit a product enhancement request.

Paul Newcome · 10/01/19

I was actually getting on this thread to ask about the same exact thing. The ability to have all options visible and selectable within a form.

Kara Lumley · 10/01/19

Thanks for the feedback- the forms team has checkboxes and “select all” on their roadmap. With the dropdown list, you can select as many options as you’d like.

Best,

Kara

Paul Newcome · 10/01/19

Awesome to hear!

My comment about "all options .......... selectable" was more in reference to radio button type layout but checkbox/multi-select capability. Basically a not as clear way of saying what you just said. Haha.

Thanks, Kara!

Richard · 10/02/19

This is great!!

Not wanting to push the boundaries too far... will this evolve further and one will be able to select multiple instances of an option in a single cell?

I haven't tried it, but could you with formulas, have a column that sums the columns of another two columns and this is a way of combining multiple instances of options?

Thanks

Andrée Starå · 10/02/19

Hi Kara,

Big thanks to the Smartsheet team for this excellent feature!

Best,

Andrée Starå

Workflow Consultant / CEO @ WORK BOLD

Paul Newcome · 10/02/19

I'm curious. Do you mean something along the lines of having the options of "A", "B", and "C", and then selecting "A" multiple times within a single cell?

Mike Wilday · 10/02/19

Thanks for sharing the roadmap Kara! Love the new additions and am looking forward to the checkboxes and select all!

Richard · 10/02/19

Hi Paul

Exactly that please.

Thanks

Paul Newcome · 10/03/19

I could definitely see some use from that. It's a good idea. Unfortunately the only thing I can suggest is to submit a Product Enhancement Request. In the mean time, you would need to use another column to include the count for each selection. You would need to be sure to include the count for ALL selections though if you were going to try to automate things, so if you wanted

AAABBCDEE

selected in the multi-select dropdown column, you would need to have

ABCDE

in the dropdown, and

32112

In the count column.

I would also suggest a delimiter so that MID functions can be used to pull each one.

Also...

A line break is used as a delimiter in the multi-select dropdown (thanks for that info, Kara), so using

CHAR(10)

in a FIND function can help with parsing out the options selected.

Tim Meeks · 10/08/19

@Kara,

Great to meet you last week @ Engage! Glad to have this new feature. Just activated it today on a form/sheet.

Tim

Kamille Gaston · 10/11/19

Is there a way to count the number of selections made in a multi-select dropdown?

Mike Wilday · 10/11/19

Hi Kamile, I don't believe that's currently possible. But its a good idea though. Consider submitting a product enhancement request.

Paul Newcome · 10/15/19

Kamille,

There is not a single direct function, but what you can do is this...

Find the total number of characters in the cell using a LEN function.

=LEN([Multi-Select Column]@row)

.

Then we will find the total number of characters once the delimiter is replaced.

=LEN(SUBSTITUTE([Multi-Select Column]@row, CHAR(10), ""))

.

Subtract that second number from the first and add 1, and that will tell you how many different selections were made.

=LEN([Multi-Select Column]@row) - LEN(SUBSTITUTE([Multi-Select Column]@row, CHAR(10), "")) + 1

Multi-Select Dropdown Update

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