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Undo Sort
Hello,
Is there any way that an old version of a smartsheet can be accesses? Someone has sorted a smartsheet that was not set up for sorting and it is now unusable. Any way that I can undo the sort?
Thanks!
Comments
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If you have a backup in an excel file, then yes you can manually try to get the sheet back.
Sometimes SS will have some backups that they can revert to, but currently there is no REAL backup solution within the platform. If someone completely hoses your sheet, get ready for some serious lost time.
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I concur with Brad. After having someone in my organization do the same thing, I started doing weekly backups of the sheet. The only resolution was to manually resort the sheet.
To schedule recurring backups you navigate to the home tab and then right click on the workspace or sheet that you want to set backups for and choose, "Schedule Recurring Backups." These are only done weekly, but that might be better than having to redo all the work manually.
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This is a 2 year old tracking sheet. How likely is it that SS would have some sort of a back up of it? I am not ready to accept the loss of time..
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Do you happen to have any system-generated column that you could sort by to return it to its previous state?
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Depending on whether or not you add/remove a lot of rows in your sheet, here's a solution for ya:
1. Sort your sheet exactly the way you want it.
2. Create a hidden and locked column and make an index in it from top to bottom.
3. When the sheet gets out of order, resort the sheet based on this hidden column.
The only trick to this is that if you add/remove many rows often then your index will need to start using decimal places to make up for the space in-between.
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A problem with Brad's suggestion is that if that hidden column uses formulas to determine the index, they can get confused when moving or deleting columns.
For mission critical sheets, I have used Zapier to create a backup sheet from the existing sheet nightly (could also be based on specific changes too). As with any sheet copy (outside of the API), the cell history is lost.
Zapier allows cells, comments, and/or attachments to be copied to the new sheet.
I hope this helps.
Craig
