Complaint / Poor Design: Blank Reports

I've just learned reports shared with users who are not also shared to the sheet (or sheets) that contain the base data cannot see the reports due to "security issues". This is - in my opinion - a seriously poor design. If Smartsheet can't secure a sheet / report relationship in this manner, what's to say anything can be secure ?!

We have sheets that contain data on multiple outside parties, which we want to share with those parties discreetly through individualized reports.

This is design choice makes that impossible short of printing the report or exporting it to Excel, which sort of defeats the whole purpose of cloud-based collaboration.

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Comments

J. Craig Williams

Dave B,

Without debating the design issues here, if the person only needs to see the data and not edit it, then you can use the Report "Send as Attachment" feature.

This will send a PDF of the Report and can be set to recurring and scheduled.

This allows me to build a project sheet that also includes all of the financial data tied to the schedule without splitting it out to a new sheet.

I can send a weekly Report showing the financials to the CFO and a Report showing the schedule dates and tasks to the customer.

I don't want either of those groups to be able to edit the underlying data and I don't want the risk of the CFO viewing the financial data in the sheet and forgetting to hide it when she closes the sheet and have the customer see it.

YMMV

Craig

Daniel Stein

Hi Dave,

If you are looking for a live view of the report where everyone sees the same data, then you may try publishing the report. This creates a view of the report using the permissions of the person who published it, so anyone with the publish link will see the same content. This article has more information about publish.

Best regards,

Daniel

Dave B

JCW: Am already doing that. But we wanted the report user to be able to log in to Smartsheet and export the report so they can filter, etc. in Excel for their own uses. This is where we hit a wall.

Daniel: Thanks, that's a workaround though the user still has to export the file then set up Excel filtering to drill down (which is our intent). My "complaint" is they should be able to do this in Smartsheet natively.

Daniel Stein

Thanks Dave. Could you please clarify what you mean by "drill down" in this case?

Dave B

Daniel: Filtering the data.

Daniel Stein

Thanks Dave -- the ability for report viewers to filter reports is something that's on our feature backlog for consideration in a future release. We appreciate your feedback on this!

Dave B

Daniel: That's a step in the right direction but it doesn't solve the original issue; that being that shared users of the report who don't have rights to the underlying sheet can't see the report w/o publishing it. I still don't understand how this can be a 'security issue'.

Daniel Stein

Hi Dave,

Indeed, understood and we have noted this request as well.

To give you some context: The intent behind the report permissions design is to give sheet owners and our customer organizations control over how their sheet data can be shared. If a sheet owner doesn't share a sheet with someone, then that person won't be able to see the sheet data in a report either. Report publish is a way to share a report view, but it also has controls meant to protect the sheet owner and organization: published reports are not editable, and publish can optionally be disabled or restricted to within the organization.

We understand that there are scenarios where customers wish to share reports without sharing the underlying sheets. When we design this capability, we'll need to balance that need against sheet owners' desire to control how their information is shared and edited.

Hope this helps!

Daniel