Assign same person to review re-submitted form tasks?

Holmes221b

I have a sheet designed to assign submitted form information for review on a rotating basis between 3 people. That’s all working fine.

The issue I’m having is that if a form is resubmitted for secondary review, I need it to assign to the original person and not fall into the rotation. So find any duplicates in a column (NAME) and assign them to the same person in another column (REVIEWER) as they were in the first row they appeared.

I can’t pre-assign the reviewers to certain names because we don’t know who will be submitting, so there is no way to ensure even distribution with pre-assignment.

Any thoughts on how best to go about this? I’ve tried various COUNTIF and INDEX/MATCH approaches but keep ending up in circular logic at some point because I need it to change the same column (REVIEWER) that it needs to validate the formula.

Thanks!

Ankesh

The reason you keep hitting a circular logic error is that a single column cannot calculate a new value while checking itself for past values. When REVIEWER looks at REVIEWER:REVIEWER, Smartsheet gets caught in an infinite loop trying to calculate the cell.

Splitting the logic into two columns might fix it:
1. Column 1 (Rotation Reviewer): Runs your standard 3-person rotation for every incoming row.

2. Column 2 (Assigned Reviewer): Checks if the NAME has appeared before:

• First submission: Takes [Rotation Reviewer]@row.
• Re-submission: Pulls the Rotation Reviewer from that person's earliest submission.

As Column 2 reads from Column 1 instead of itself, the circular loop disappears completely. Try this and let me know if it solves your purpose.

Thanks, Ankesh