Reporting and Dashboards Blog

Reporting and Dashboards Blog

Scheduling and Emailing reports in salesforce.com

Thomas Tobin Nov 30, 2008

So, another feature that had been widely requested was the ability to grab the results of a printable view of the report, and send it to a set of users:




Getting scheduling to work:

I'm going to assume that either

  1. your user has a "System Administrator" profile, so you have this turned on in your profile
  2. your local administrator has turned this on for you, so you'll be able to schedule for yourself
  3. If you are using custom administrator profiles, you may or may not have this turned on depending on your other permissions

so we'll leave the permissions/profile discussion to a local one - I'm going to assume you have the right to schedule.

Viewing a report today
When you view a report in Winter'09, you should see an extra control on the "Run Report" button.

This new down-arrow allows you to select between two choices:

You can run the report now - the default if you click the button, and what was the only choice, or you can schedule the report to be run.
Just like when you schedule a dashboard, you can choose the destination emails.
Who you can send to depends on who can see the folder where the report is saved. If it's in your personal folder, there won't be a lot of choices.
If it's in a public folder, then you can choose pretty much anybody.
Otherwise, if it's in a folder shared to a set of roles, groups, or users, you can choose from them:

The last options are different from the options on the dashboard scheduling page. When scheduling, you might have changed the report before scheduling it. Since you might expect to schedule the one you've been working on, the first option lets you save the report as-is, and the schedule you are setting up.
Alternatively, you can schedule the report based on the last saved version of the report - and discard the current set of report changes you've done.

What you get


So, what do you get in your email?
You get the output of the printable view, with a few small additions to make sure things make sense:
the running user is displayed, the time it ran was displayed, then there is the list of filters present (so you have some context).

And that will arrive every time you asked! Easy!

If you ever have problems, keep any mails that turn up - not just the content, but also the headers. We've seen instances in support where we sent the mails on time, but they were held up somewhere along the way, so keep the email and know how to get to the "internet headers" as they are sometimes called. This allows support to work to find where there was a problem.

 

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