Reference to other sheets not changing in countifs when saving folders as new

Hi Craig.  Thanks for your comment.  Yes I'm sure.  I've experienced this on a couple of occasions now and can easily recreate the issue.

The sheet that I have the issue with is being used to calculate values that are used in a dashboard.  The net result is that the dashboards don't work once the workspace has been copied - essentially because all the references are incorrectly pointing at the original sheets, not the new ones.

Despite there being a checkbox for newly created sheet, it doesn't appear to work.

Just to clarify, I'm saving as new a folder within one workspace into a different workspace.  The folder structure contains sheets which references other sheets in the same folder structure.  When I save new the folder structure, all the references within new sheets point to the original sheets not new ones.

If you save as new an entire workspace, the references are all ok - i.e. they point to the new sheets.  However this isn't a workable solution for my scenario.

So the issue seems to be that saving folders between workspaces doesn't correctly update the references to the newly created sheets.

Thanks Craig.  I've done that.

I look forward to hearing back.

Hope you enjoy your coffee :-)

Thanks for your help with this Craig.

I've spent many more hours trying to figure this out.  Essentially the fact that the name of the ranges don't change when you save as new a folder (and therefore sheets contained) into a new workspace as well as changing the name of the new sheets, makes this extremely confusing.  I've concluded that going forward the best practice is to use generic range names and not to relate them to the sheet (or workspace) name.  It seems that range names (certainly across sheets) don't have to be unique.

Not having the range names change automatically means that the first time you view the new sheets and dashboards, it appears that the references aren't correct.  Again, using generic names makes this less complex and means you don't have to rename all your references.

So essentially, I've done a lot of testing and am happy that smartsheet is working as advertised.

Hi Craig

I agree that the 'generic' name has to have meaning.  smartsheet current defaults the range name to include the sheet name.  We're prefixing sheet names with a customer name so when we're saving as new, we're unknowingly distributing customer names - even though they are 'hidden' in references.  The approach that we've landed on is to change the range names to reflect the column or data group, and to remove the customer name.

It's not ideal, and really smartsheet should be updating the range name automatically, but it provides a workaround at least.