Share multiple reports at one time

Tanya Brooks

I have 30 reports I want to share with 20 people, setting them all with view only access to all reports.

Is there a way to select multiple reports at one time and assign same permissions to all of them at once?

Tanya Brooks

Brett Robinson

Create a workspace and put the reports in the workspace. Then you can share the workspace and give them view-only access to the workspace. That will give them view access to the reports. However, at this time I believe you'll have to also share the underlying sheet with the people for them to view the information (at least I've run into that issue in the past and I don't think it's changed yet).

If you do not want to share the underlying sheet, you can create a dashboard and publish the reports as view only to the dashboard. Then share the dashboard that will allow a live look at all the reports.

Tanya Brooks

Thanks Brett. I did create and publish a dashboard, thinking publishing eliminated the need to share reports. But users cannot open reports from published dashboard. I have set up dashboard with allow access to all with link and read full. Am i missing a setting in the publishing of the dashboard?

Tanya Brooks

Hi Brett -

I published a dashboard containing reports thinking publishing would allow users to see reports.

User can open report link but sees no data. So I gave user view only access to the report. Again, user can open report link but sees no data.

Are you suggesting I create a dashboard separate from the one for my admin team that is for regular users, recreate all my reports in "View only" versions, and populate the new dashboard with those view only reports? That seems like a crazy work around to provide view only access, something I thought was part of basic functionality. I am happy to correct whatever I am doing wrong if someone would just help pinpoint what that is.

Thanks,

Tanya

Brett Robinson

Hi Tanya,

View only access to the report without access to the source sheet will not show data. The troubleshooting section here explains. It's an issue that has caused me problems in the past when I don't want to share the source sheet.

What I've done in the past to get around this is publish the report and added the published report to a dashboard. When you publish the report and click get link you can change the access settings to allow anyone with the link to view the report. Then copy the link and use that link to create the dashboard widget. I just tested it out again on some stuff I have and it worked... I'm happy to look at some copies of your stuff without confidential information to try and troubleshoot the settings.

Tanya Brooks

Thanks Brett-

I tried inserting published reports using both the web content widget and the report widget. The functionality for viewing works fine, but the content inserted into the dashboard is a graphic of the actual report rows that users can click on. With 30 reports this makes for a messy and confusing dashboard. I am hoping to find a way to have users view published reports from the dashboard but all that is visible is the report title (so the list of reports appears as it would if one uses the shortcut widget).

Tanya

Brett Robinson

Can you share a screenshot of what you want the dashboard to like?

For the Shortcut widget, you should be able to paste the view only link as a URL and then type in the display text as the report title. Little more work than simply click the Smartsheet Item.