Share Dashboard

AAL

Hi

When I intend to share this dashboard with the students, is it sufficient to share the dashboard link, or should I also share the metrics sheets separately if they only have the sign-on credentials?

Lauren Dominique

Hi there,

One recommendation would be to use the publish feature to send students a link to the live, view-only dashboard that will not require they sign in, nor will it require you share any underlying source sheets with them. To get this link, you’ll click “File” in the top left, then “Publish”.

If you were to share the Dashboard with them (as opposed to publishing it for them), they would need access to the underlying metric sheets, or else they’d see error messages where those charts are.

The publish feature is nice when you want someone to be able to view the data in real-time, without actually sharing all the backend information with them.

Hope this is helpful!

AAL

Hi Lauren,

I appreciate your quick response. I omitted to mention that the report widget I've embedded in the dashboard is filtered by "Current User." This setup is intended to allow each student to see their own results in the dashboard without viewing others' information. In this scenario, should I request the students to sign up for Smartsheet accounts? Subsequently, I would only need to share the Smartsheet with them, omitting the metrics sheets. How would you recommend proceeding in this case?

I'd also like to inquire if there's a method to include a title heading featuring the student's name at the top of the dashboard when they access the link I provide. Is this feasible?

Thanks!

Lauren Dominique

Ahh, very interesting. Thanks for clarifying this. In this case, I do believe the students would need to make a Smartsheet account, or else Smartsheet would not know how to match them to the Contact column in order to display the rows of the current user.

To your second question: When you share a Dashboard with someone, they can only see the data presented in a widget if they have access to an underlying report. Otherwise, they would see this message for any widget to which they don't have at least viewer access to the source sheet:

One way around this may be to create a Dashboard with a filter (unfortunately this is where my expertise ends - I only recently learned about this at ENGAGE 2023 and have not yet had a chance to dig into how it's done and implement it in my dashboards). But, from what I saw, I do believe this could be a viable solution for what you need to do. If I recall correctly from the demo session I attended at ENGAGE, the filtered dashboard uses a form to select the filter. So, you'd have a form of all your students names, and the data displayed on the dashboard would change based on which student is selected (so, it would sort of work like your "current user" view, except the students wouldn't have to have a Smartsheet account to view their data). I know the demo also included a title field so you could see what filter was applied to the dashboard, so that would solve your need for wanting the name of the student at the top of their view.

If this works the way I think it would, I believe you could still publish the Dashboard in "View Only" mode, thus saving your students from having to make a Smartsheet account, and not have to share them to all the underlying sheets. The potential downside would be if there is sensitive student information on the dashboard, because there would really be nothing stopping Student #1 from selecting the filter to view Student #2's data.

I'm sorry I can't walk you through the details of filtering on dashboards, but there should be a recording from ENGAGE or you may be able to find someone else on here with that expertise.