This feels like a pretty basic question; no doubt the answer will be so obvious I’ll be .
I’m using Google Sheets for tables that include, inter alia, my user table. I’ve got columns for “firstName”, “lastName”, and “Nickname”. I can add a calculated “Name” column (required in order for my table to be a real user table, right?), but:
If I create that field in Sheets, the formula doesn’t carry over (am I wrong?), so. . . not useful. I can’t add the formula in Glide, because I already have data in that column in the Sheet.
If I create the field in Glide, that works fine except that the column isn’t available to me to select as the “Name” field in the User Profile tab.
(Note that the “FullName” column isn’t included in the dropdown. I had another image showing the definition of the “FullName” column, but the site limited me to one image. )
Am I thinking of this wrong? It’s such a common use case, I’ve got to believe there’s an easy way to do it.
Simple answer here is that you cannot use (Glide) computed columns in your User Profiles configuration.
Options:
Choose one of your other name columns to use in your User Profiles configuration
Use an arrayformula in your Google Spreadsheet to construct your “Fullname” (using an arrayformula will overcome your “doesn’t carry over” problem)
As a general rule of thumb, it’s best to avoid spreadsheet formulas with Glide as much as possible, and use Glide computed columns instead. This is one of the rare exceptions where you can’t do that.
Thanks! Yeah my instinct was to keep the calculations on the Glide side, but I was specifically struggling with this case that turns out, as you have explained, to be an exception. Also the arrayformula workaround is sort of generally interesting as a way to import some formulae, so thanks again!
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