SharePoint Person or Group Multiple Selections People Lookup Field Disappears from SharePoint Designer – Workaround

I was recently asked to create a workflow for up and coming events. The requirement was to send an email to all attendees 2 weeks before the meeting was due to start.

I’d previously attempted a similar task in a previous blog which I never managed to resolve but thought I'd give it another go.

This post doesn’t cover the workflow see here for the full blog post. This blog entry covers the multi people look up column and an issue I found when trying to use the column in SharePoint Designer and how this was resolved.

So firstly I created an attendees column for the calendar entry as shown below (noting that ‘Allow multiple selections’ is set to ‘No’)

This will allow for the value to be selected from SharePoint Designer. However as with most meetings I've attended they generally involve more than one person so there is need here for multiple persons to be entered in this column - this is where the problem comes in! If you change the value of ‘Allow multiple selections’ is set to ‘Yes’ you can no longer select this field in SharePoint Designer Workflow.

The way to workaround this is to create your workflow with the option set to ‘No’.

Test your workflow and make sure it achieves the results you set out to and believe me you will need to test it more than once before you get it right. Then once you have tested and emails are successfully sent to the recipient change the value to ‘Yes’ and you can now send email to multiple people using SharePoint Designer workflow.