Need help/best practices for cleaning up my sheet

I need help organizing my data. I started quite some time ago and so features may not have existed and I have done workarounds that may have actual functions now. I need assistance cleaning my sheet formats so that it is more streamlined and seamless, as right now I have to manually add things and make adjustments. I’d like to clean this out before releasing to the people who have signed up, hopefully this weekend if doable. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated and suggestions on whether I should use different integrations as well.

I currently get signups via Typeform. Once signed up, based on their input, users can be found by name, role, location, categories, groups (I am doing this manually for people in multiple groups (concatenating their entries) now so an easier way to do this would help. Other items can also be posted and they would fit into specific categories as well.

I currently pull images from Twitter profiles with a formula, but for people that want to override that it wacks the formula out.

Some of the categories I don’t want everyone to be able to see unless they are from that category or that person has chosen to make that information visible on their profile. If they would like them shown I’d like them to be tagged for that. Currently, everyone can be seen by category, I know I can make those visible to certain groups, but not sure how to override that if they decide they’d like to turn that option on to visible to everyone.

If someone posts a resource/event and people are interested/attended, I’d like to be able to tag them so that those people can be easily filtered. If they are on the list, I’d like them to be able to see the list, if not, nothing appears unless manually added (by admin or invite) but I am not sure if I can restrict visibility to an entire list or if this has to be done with some sort of tag.

Currently people can be in multiple categories, etc.and I want to make sure they show up in all of them. I did this manually, it is not working for all categories a user may be in, some categories aren’t displaying their users.

Hope this makes sense.

Thanks in advance.

Is there any reason you choose not to use Glide’s form or features?

Do you mean by the “Search” function? I suppose when you actually show those fields, let’s say in a basic table then it’s searchable.

Currently there’s no way to point the image field in user profiles to a Glide-created column. If we have something like that we can use an If > Then > Else for this.

Change the visibility to show if the current screen’s public value is True, or user’s category matches the category (what you currently have).

Make a user-specific boolean column and get a switch/checkbox in the event detailed view. If users want to attend they can switch the value to True. You can show the interested events to people who have the value set to True. However, they can’t see other people who are interested in the same event since it’s a user-specific column. If you want them to see each other you have to catch it via a form to a new sheet with the email of users who are interested, then make a relation to link that back to the event.

The above method would fit with the invitation way you want to go with. Admins can manually add people who are interested to the event using the same form. Only downside is that would eat up a lot of rows.

I used Typeform because I started when glide first came out (pathetic not to be launched) and was already collecting signups that way. Once the form function was created I created one within the app, but I haven’t used it for signup because the app had other issues so it wasn’t ready yet. I guess I could switch once functional.

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Crazy question, how do I respond to each question individually like you have?

Make sure you have an array column for this (Category 1, Category 2, etc.). Then create a relation in the Categories sheet matching the Category name to the array column in the User profiles sheet. I believe it would work as you want.

I’m on my laptop, when I highlight the text there’s a “quote” option.

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No, I do have the search function, but what I am currently doing it creating multiple columns for multiple roles, then I have a sheet with those role and when I pull a list for that role, they will show up on it. Hopefully that makes sense. So lets say I’m a teacher and a student, I list both of those roles and if i go to teachers or students I should be listed in both. This is working ok for now, but I know it can be cleaner and if someone lists say 10 roles and I currently have only up to 5, what would happen?

Thanks for the quote tip :slight_smile: I think this would work. So if field is empty use twitter image, if not use profile image.

This works currently, but I’m afraid as I mentioned in another note of what will happen if another category is added. I have added all of the category columns manually, will it automatically create another column if I allow them them enter custom roles not listed?

Yeah that makes sense, do you have them in an array column like Role 1, Role 2 etc. If I do this in Glide, I would create like 10 roles column, then show them in the form one after one and only the first one is required. Role 2 entry only shows when Role 1 is not empty etc. By that way I can be sure no one can go over my limit of 10.

Ok, that makes sense. I will create 10 roles, after that we will consider it overkill :slight_smile: I will also do the conditional so the form doesn’t look intimidating.

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If you want it to add a new column automatically probably something like this would work.

=ARRAYFORMULA(TRANSPOSE(UNIQUE('Categories'!A2:A)))

And put it in the first cell where you want to start recording the categories. How are you getting the Category values for each column? Is it a boolean?

There are currently booleans, but they can also add additional roles in ‘other’. Which leads to my other point. I have a roles sheet, if they add a role I do not have, can it add that role to the sheet so that others can select from it next time to keep the names uniform and groupings good?

If you’re using a form, I would have a setup like this:

  • Original roles (roles you have at the start where you add them in manually)

  • All roles: Use a UNIQUE function to bring back all unique roles that users have entered, which would contain the “other” roles

  • Combined roles: This will be the one you use for your choice component.

    =UNIQUE({A2:A,B2:B})

This will bring original roles and all roles stacked on top of each other, then have a unique function to get only unique roles. You will have the “other” roles for future users.

Thank you! I will try it.

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Thanks for your advice on making these items work, i’m still a little lost (because i started way before some features were built and did workarounds that may not make it so easy to just add new records and the formulas continue for the new items since I started from typeform). I’m thinking maybe I should probably just start with a clean sheet
and form within glide and import the user data manually. I want to make sure once I do that, the format is clean enough that when a new record is added it adheres to the formulas in place, puts the people in the right categories and displays the correct inline lists on pages.

Arrays vs. True/False

I have multiple users, with multiple roles, multiple categorizations, etc.
I know in some cases I should use arrays, for example for roles (designer, developer = role 1, role 2)
However, what would be the best method to use for categories? Previously I was doing this like (freelancer, available = category 1, category 2) but in this example would it make more sense and be cleaner to just list the categories and check true or false in a multiple choice question in a form? Should I then create sheets for each of these roles and relate it back to the user tab? I ask because my inline lists are working for some things but repeating that same data in the wrong places even if i try to tell it display based on the category, so I’m thinking maybe I may need a list for each item?

Form setup for mutli-level filtering (multiple choice)

If you recall I currently have the info coming from typeform and after importing I was having to put them in the array format manually. I’m looking for a clean way to just indicate where this particular person would show up making filtering and sorting easier and able to show multiple value complex selections like designer, available, california)>. Currently I go to one of these categories and find them although it would be great to get exact matches for all criteria.

Any suggestions appreciated.

In my experience, I would prefer the choice component way instead of the checkbox way, because when I do relations later to other sheets, what I need is the actual category text, not the True or False value and I always have to convert the boolean values back to text in the Sheets.

Without knowing exactly what you need for relations in this case, I’m gonna say just make one single sheet and make correct relations back to the array column.

If you need multi level filtering, probably you can watch this video by Robert.

Yes, I tested it before you had responded and you are right, I ended up needing to recreate all of the data as the value name I wanted and change the column header.

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