Remove a formula from an entire column

Question

My company have an ongoing issue with one of our shared Smartsheet's - the dates keep switching to American style even though we paste them from a spreadsheet into the Smartsheet in the English format. We then individually have to change them to UK, and they keep turning back to American.

I have had a google and a play around with everyone's individual regional preferences on the Smartsheet and they are all UK so correct. I have also been made admin on the Smartsheet so I could look at the format on the actual sheet, and it shows the correct UK preference.

I then copied a formula from someone on this help centre community into the column formula section and it has taken all the dates out and replaced it with '#UNPARSEABLE' and it now wont let me take the formula out and go back to the original date format, I'm afraid I've lost years worth of data.

Can someone please help urgently?

Chloe.Total · Answer

So thought I'd share how this was solved - because I wasn't the owner of the sheet I couldn't do what I needed to do. I then went onto the owner's computer and managed to download the snapshot of the data that was there before it became incorrect on the activity log. I then copied them and pasted back into the Smartsheet.

The above steps you have advised weren't available to me unfortunately.

Paul Newcome · Answer

If it was a formula that was previously generating the dates, you can "Edit Column Formula" and put the old formula back. Generally speaking, you can find formulas in the Activity Log, or, if you are in Table View, the cell history.

If it was manually entered dates, the only solution here is to "Convert To Cell Formula", delete the formula from the cells, then manually check cell history to re-enter each date one by one. This can be more automated using the API, the premium add-on Bridge, or other similar third party apps as well.

Ape_Man819 · Answer

You should be able to right click on one of the cells in that column and then select "Edit Column Formula", then edit it or remove it. Just know when you do this when you hit enter it does update the formula in all cells in that column.