Chris,

Your question was a little scattered . The actions set field would ideally do the trick, however, I would put a conditional statement on the workflow to restrict when it runs or have a run if statement to evaluate what happens when it ran. Otherwise as you noted you would get an infinite loop issue occurring where the workflow will update the status which then would kick off another workflow to run and update the status.

You'll want to avoid this as much as possibe. A way to architect against that is to have two different fields. One is the status of the object and the other is the workflow status field. Both would have to evaluate to true in order for the workflow to run and the workflow would update the item status field to say Started from New and then mark itself as Complete. Just a thought to help you achieve this. 

If you can provide a screenshot that would help as well. 

Eric - see below. List Item. Choice Column. Choices are Countries. On premisis Nintex grabs the values from the choice column as a drop down when Setting Field Value. O365 does not grab the choices from the choice column. This is kinda basic. It appears O365 Nintex can only read column titles when creating workflows. The NintexO365 capabilities compared to the on-prem version are underwhelming. This feels like we've stepped back to 1.0/beta rather than moving forward.

Chris

I'm still not following what you are attempting to do. Based on your screenshot you should be able to set a value there for what you want the Status field to be. In addition you can also select Advanced Lookup if you want to go further in defining that.

What is the structure of your content. You are running a list item workflow and you want the workflow to update the status on that item from one choice to another? So going from New to Started? 

This is doable but you may not be seeing the pre-polulated dropdown which may be throwing you off. You can type the value you want into the field and it should work as needed.

Not sure how I can say this more clearly. On premises Nintex: Update field (choice column) in current item: Nintex understands in the non O365 context that it's a choice column and provides those choices so you can set which one to update to: Like moving a status from New to Started if those are two status choices in the column.  

In the O365 Nintex, you can select the column you want to update, but Nintex doesn't return the values/choices available in that choice column. It asks what you want to update to and provides a blank field, or the option to go into an infinite loop of selecting list and column from the "Advanced Lookup" - advanced lookup still doesn't retrieve the choices in a choice column to choose from to update the current item. The point is that you need to know your values to hard code in, which is tough if the choices are not 3 simple, lower case words. Let me know if you need me to set up a WebEx to show you the above screen shots happen real time.

Chris,

Yes you confirmed what I was assuming at wrote in my last statement. While it is not ideal from a UX experience, functionaly you are able to type in the value needed to run the update/set field and run the workflow. 

Head here Customer Feedback for Nintex and provide that feedback. 

Would be good  to add this as a User Voice request.