Automating weekly report

Meghana Ramesh

Hello,

I currently am trying to automate a process but having few issues:I currently send out an email manually to send their top 3 accomplishments, top 3 issues for last week etc.

• I am trying to automate the sending out email.
• I want to keep the historic data but do not want multiple columns with each week.

Is there a way that I could automatically gather the information from each team member & a new sheet is created for that week.

Genevieve P.

Hi Meghana,

What about sending an Update Request? (See here.)

You could set up your sheet with 8 Columns: 3 for recording Accomplishments, 3 for recording issues, 1 date column (perhaps a Modified date system column), and 1 Contact Column.

You could have a workflow send once a week as its trigger to the person in the Contact Column.

Then you could have a second workflow that Copies rows over after they have been updated (see here). This means that you're keeping the historical data in a separate sheet, a back-up or archived sheet, but then you are receiving new content each week from the form filled out through the Update Request.

This current sheet would only retain the most recent data entered.

Here's an example of the Update Request:

Update Requests are great because there's a log of them, as well, so you can see if the user has filled in the request yet or not.

Let me know if this would work for you!

Cheers,

Genevieve

Meghana Ramesh

Thank you Genevieve.

I quickly also wanted to ask you if this weekly report can it also be automatically exported to word document?

Genevieve P.

Hi Meghana,

If you're a licensed user on a multi-user plan, you can schedule weekly backups of sheets in a workspace. This would then email you an excel version of the file each week, would that work? See here for more details: https://help.smartsheet.com/articles/506499-back-up-your-data#toc-schedule-weekly-recurring-backups

Andrew1983

@Genevieve P I have a similiar question:

I have 9 engineers who fill out their individual submittal logs and then each PM gets a report from those 9 sheets, filtered by the PM. I would like to send the PM the report itself each week, or at least send a link to the report.

The PDF option isn't good because it is a static document, and I want PM's to change the dates right in the report.

Is it possible to send out a link to the report itself automatically each week?

Genevieve P.

Hi @Andrew1983

What if you set up the "Send as Attachment" Report as a PDF on a recurring weekly basis, but then in the Custom Message section you included the URL to the Report asking them to make changes by clicking that link?

This way they would first see the static information, but then also be automatically emailed the link to the actual, live data to edit.

Would this work for you?

Cheers,

Genevieve

Andrew1983

YES! that will work perfectly! thank you :)

Genevieve P.

No problem! I'm glad I could help. 🙂