Reports are great for sharing specific information from teams to leadership or external partners. However, it is a huge limitation for published reports not to have the ability to hide conversations. Conversations are a great feature for internal teams to be able to communicate on specific line items within a sheet, when publishing a sheet or adding a report as a widget to dashboards users can hide the conversations.
But this ability isn't available when publishing a report for some reason. This is a significant limitation of the publish feature on the report level. It has caused me to be unable to share certain reports externally via a link since external partners or leadership at my organization don't need visibility into the internal team's conversations on the specific line items.
This feature should be turned on so that users can publish reports without comments included so that they can share view-only reports via links to users not in their smartsheet instance.
Best idea I ever heard (TLDR)
We published a calendar (based on a report) to a vendor and they can see our personal comments! Not good.
Please add the following options when publishing a report (Read Only - Full):
These should be 2 separate options.
Reason:
While it is possible to hide the attachments and comments column, they are still accessible by the report view from the right rail thru the conversations icon and the sheet attachments icon. In our use case, we want to share data in a report but the underlying comments are confidential as well as all the supporting documentation that is associated with a particular row.
Workarounds:
We can drop the report into a dashboard view which would not show the right column options for attachments .. however, that creates another layer that is not needed and limits functionality (cannot print the report directly, etc).