Allowing people to edit reports without having access to the main sheet

Kegan Copas · 07/22/21

HI All,

Is there any way that I can share reports with people and give them the ability to edit information through these reports without sharing the main sheet with them?

I have sensitive date on the main sheet that i do not want them having visibility of but would like them to be able to update a number of key fields of this data.

Regards

Frank Falco · 07/22/21

Unfortunately not. To access a report the user must have access to the underlying sheet.

This has been raised several times and suggestions such as having a 'hidden' sharing state for the sheet would solve this.

You could achieve this using Dynamic View but that has its own issues and comes at an additional cost.

We tried Dynamic view for a year for exactly this reason and we did not continue with it as the users did not like the limitations with it, such as conditional formatting and no card view. We eventually had to expose the sheet to all the users and that caused issues with accessing sensitive information as you point out.

It is a serious issue that SmartSheet does not seem interested in addressing.

Kegan Copas · 07/22/21

Thanks for your reply Frank. Do you recommend any other way of managing this as a workaround?

Andrée Starå · 07/22/21

Hi @Kegan Copas

I hope you're well and safe!

To add to Frank Falco's excellent advice/answer.

Another option (if you have Enterprise or higher) could be to use the WorkApps feature instead.

Would that work/help?

I hope that helps!

Be safe and have a fantastic week!

Best,

Andrée Starå | Workflow Consultant / CEO @ WORK BOLD

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KRichard · 11/28/23

It's really inconvenient not to be able to edit the report without access to the base sheet.

Kam114 · 04/19/24

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/comment/406780#Comment_406780

I don't get why this is not a basic feature (that doesn't come at an additional cost) The fact that admins have to create separate reports for the same exact data just to wrap text is quite bizarre. We're having a tug o' war with our end users on going back to Excel or not for our data.

I really hope Dynamic View is something that would eventually come included in Enterprise/Business plans. As an admin, it induces quite a bit of burnout to create a new report for every single filter requested, adding to the long lists in our workspace that could easily be mitigated by 'dynamic' views that exist for free in other spreadsheet applications. I don't know why this is the intended design for SmartSheet other than to create more revenue for SmartSheet for users who want to simplify their lives. SmartSheet reports as they are right now, are not very 'smart,' if something as basic as view-only filtering is not included except in an add-on dynamicview plan.

🙉

Kam114 · 04/19/24

I don't get why this is not a basic feature already. The fact that admins have to create separate reports for the same exact data just to wrap text is quite bizarre. We're having a tug 'owar with our end users on going back to Excel or not for our data.

I really hope Dynamic View is something that would eventually come included in Enterprise/Business plans. As an admin it induces quite a bit of burnout to create a new report for every single filter requested by our project managers, adding to the long list of objects in our workspaces that could easily be mitigated by 'dynamic' views that already exist in other spreadsheet applications. View-only filtering/sorting should be a basic feature.

(Reposting as my last comment got deleted for some reason).

Allowing people to edit reports without having access to the main sheet

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