Three sheets about one customer become one customer

Teams whose operations have outgrown a sheet — jobs against sites, orders against customers, invoices against both — and who currently hold those connections together with cell links, cross-sheet references and somebody's monthly export.

  • One sheet becomes one table, with columns typed rather than flattened into text
  • The primary column becomes field one and the record's name — the job it already had
  • Auto-number, duration, predecessor and symbol columns keep their values and are named in the report
  • Indented rows arrive flat on purpose, and a relation you draw replaces the outline
  • No write permission is requested, because nothing here writes back to Smartsheet
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Watch the move

Your sheets, with the links they never had. Two minutes, including the parts that don't come across.

How the move goes

Three steps. Nothing to export, and nothing to tidy up first — a sheet already has typed columns, which is most of the work done.

  1. Find Smartsheet and press Connect

    Settings, then Integrations. Search narrows the gallery as you type.

    IN ROWFOLD · SETTINGS → INTEGRATIONS
    Browse integrations

    Smartsheet

    Spreadsheets & databases

    Import Smartsheet sheets as RowFold tables, with their typed columns mapped to real field types.

    import
    Connect
  2. Approve two read permissions

    Smartsheet asks you to authorise. RowFold wants to see your sheets, and to see who you are so the connection can be labelled with the account you actually signed in as. There is no write permission on the list, because no part of this connector writes back to Smartsheet.

    ON SMARTSHEET’S OWN SITE

    RowFold wants access to your Smartsheet account

    smartsheet.com
    See your sheetsREAD_SHEETS read
    See who you areREAD_USERS read
    Write to your sheets not requested
    Allow Cancel
  3. Import a sheet, then link it to the others

    One sheet becomes one table, up to ten thousand rows, with its primary column becoming the first field and the record’s name. Bring the next sheet whenever you are ready — each import stands alone. The step that makes it worth doing comes after: add a relation, and three tables about one customer stop being three sheets.

    IN ROWFOLD · SETTINGS → INTEGRATIONS, THEN THE TABLE
    Choose what to import

    Each one becomes a table in Harbour Logistics. Importing runs in the background.

    Deliveries 20261,140 rows · 9 columns Import
    Customers86 rows · 6 columns Import
    Then: add a relation from Deliveries to Customersone link, and it holds from both ends the point

There is no fourth step, and that is worth saying plainly: this route imports once and does not mirror. Whichever sheet you bring across is the copy that counts from that moment, so move the quiet ones first.

The switching math

RowFold is $29/month per editor, with unlimited free read-only viewers — the whole price list in one sentence. Put your own numbers beside it; we don't quote other tools' prices here, because plans change and your invoice is the honest source.

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WHAT IT FIXES

The four things that actually go wrong

A cell link joins two cells and a cross-sheet reference joins a range. Neither of them says that this row belongs to that customer, so the connection lives in whoever built it — and it breaks the first time somebody inserts a row above it, renames a sheet, or copies one to start next quarter.

You link the tables once and the connection becomes a property of the record rather than of a coordinate. Point Orders at Customers and every order carries its customer permanently, while the customer's own screen fills with its orders without anybody building that side. Inserting rows, reordering columns and renaming tables cannot reach it, because it was never expressed as a position in a grid.

Indentation is carrying structure. It is how a sheet says these five rows belong to that one, and it holds only while those rows stay adjacent and in that order. Sort by due date and the meaning evaporates; hand the sheet to somebody who sorts it their own way and it evaporates for them too.

Indented rows arrive flat, and the import says so in words rather than guessing. That is deliberate: an outline can mean sub-task, phase, line item or just visual grouping, and inventing a parent-child link from an indent would be a guess about somebody's intent. What replaces it is a relation you draw once — Line items pointing at Orders, Tasks pointing at Projects — and grouping that survives any sort, including somebody else's.

Every importer sounds confident until you look at the column that mattered. A working sheet is full of things with no equivalent anywhere: an auto-number that stamped the job numbers your customers quote back at you, a duration written as 3d, a contact column, a column of red and amber balls, a predecessor chain holding a schedule together.

Each of those lands as text with its value intact, and every single one is named in the import report before you go looking for it. The job numbers already issued are kept; the sequence does not continue here, and the report says exactly that rather than leaving you to discover it at the next invoice. Nothing is dropped in silence, which is the only property of an importer worth trusting.

Moving is usually sold as risk-free, and here it genuinely is not. This route runs one way and once: nothing keeps a table and a sheet in step afterwards, so whichever sheet you bring across is the copy that counts from that moment, and a team still typing into both will diverge within a week.

So the order of the move is the whole method. Take the quietest sheet first, live in it for a fortnight, and bring the next one when you are ready — each import stands alone and nothing about the first has to be finished. Where a genuine parallel quarter is non-negotiable, the Airtable route does offer a scheduled mirror and this one does not, and that difference is worth knowing before you plan the sequence rather than after.

QUESTIONS

Before you start

What does the import actually bring across?

One sheet becomes one table. Columns arrive as typed fields rather than as a wall of text: a checkbox becomes a real yes-or-no, a dropdown becomes a select carrying its options, a multi-select picklist stays multi-select, and a date column keeps its time where the column had one. The primary column becomes the first field and the record's name — the job it was already doing over there, so nothing needs renaming afterwards. Rows arrive as records, up to ten thousand from a single sheet, and the run says plainly if a sheet held more.

What does it leave behind, and would I find out?

The grid, and only the grid. Attachments, comments and cell history each hang off individual rows and would need a separate request per row, so they stay where they are. Indented rows arrive flat. Auto-number, contact, duration, predecessor and symbol columns arrive as text holding the value they had, with the symbol column keeping the word underneath the picture rather than the picture. Every one of those is written into the report in plain sentences at the end of the run. An import that hides what it could not manage is worse than one that simply could not manage it.

Can we run both systems while the team moves over?

You can, but nothing automates it, and that is the honest difference between this route and the Airtable one. There is no scheduled mirror on this connector: nothing re-imports on an hourly or daily cycle, and nothing pushes anything back the other way — RowFold does not even ask Smartsheet for permission to write, because it has no reason to. Running in parallel therefore means people entering into both, which is tolerable for one sheet and miserable for twelve. Sequence the move so the busiest sheet goes last.

If the import does not create relations, how do I get them?

You draw them, and it is roughly a minute per link. Add a relation field to the table that should point somewhere — Orders at Customers, Jobs at Sites — and match the text values already sitting in the column to records in the target table. From then on it holds in both directions at once: the customer's record lists its orders with nobody building that view, a rollup totals them, and a lookup pulls the customer's region onto every order without copying the region anywhere. This is the step the whole move exists for, so it is worth doing before you import the third sheet rather than after.

What happens to my Gantt views and dependencies?

A schedule keeps its shape: RowFold has a Timeline view that draws records as bars across a date range, grouped how you choose. What does not survive is the dependency chain. Predecessor columns import as text, and nothing here recalculates a critical path or shifts downstream tasks when a date moves. If plan-driven scheduling with real dependencies is the centre of what you do, that is a straightforward reason to keep Smartsheet for that work — and a better thing to read on this page than to discover in week three.

What permissions does connecting actually grant?

Two, and both only read. One to see your sheets, which is the import itself, and one to see who you are, which exists so the connection can be labelled with the account somebody actually authorised. There is no write permission on the consent screen, because no part of this connector writes to Smartsheet and a permission the code cannot spend has no business being requested. Access is account-wide in the sense that the sheet list shows everything the authorising person can already open — it grants nothing that person did not already have.

What does it cost, and do the people who only look need a seat?

One flat price per editor per month and nothing else on the invoice: no plan ladder, no record tiers, no separate line for automations, forms or the API. Anyone who only reads is free, permanently, with no cap on how many. For a team coming off a sheet that is usually the figure that actually moves, because the people checking a status outnumber the people typing into it several times over. Smartsheet's own prices are deliberately absent from this page — a number copied last quarter is a number we would be getting wrong — so the calculator above takes yours.

Describe yours and watch it build

There is no template to wait for. Type a sentence about what you run and RowFold assembles the tables, links, views and dashboard around it — then you change whatever does not fit.

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