Subscribe to get report attachments directly in your inbox
Operational Reports & Dashboards is one of the most heavily used features within Salesforce with a large footprint. It enables business users to access and analyze their data with ease to make data-driven decisions. With the plethora of feature requests for reports & dashboards, prioritization is always a juggle. In the past few releases, we’ve improved the lightning report builder, adding advanced features like Disable Preview, Sorting, Conditional Formatting, and Unique Count. Now, our goal is to have this data available for you at your fingertips.
Until now if you wanted to view your data, you had to log into Salesforce and run your report. A variety of end-users with different roles consume reports, and they don’t always want to log in to Salesforce to view their data. They need an option that’s easily and readily accessible.
Let’s dive into an example
You’re the leader of a Sales team and have a weekly sync with your team on Mondays at 9 AM. You often take this call while driving to the office and don’t always have the time in the morning to log into Salesforce to prepare in advance. You want to be able to skim through a report quickly before you head to the office to check overall forecasting numbers and the top 5 deals your team is working on.
Get reports delivered directly to your inbox
With the new Report Subscription Attachment feature, you or your admin can subscribe you to reports to be delivered on schedule to your inbox. Each email includes a report summary with filters that you can easily view on your mobile device or desktop. Later you can click the email attachment to open the report in Salesforce.
In our example, your admin can subscribe you to a summary report with details of the top 5 deals that your team is working on. You can have the report to be delivered to you at 7 AM on Mondays so you always have the latest data for the sales meeting.
Customize subscriptions even further
The attached reports can have up to 15,000 rows and 30 columns, and the report can be delivered as a formatted Excel file or a details-only CSV file with your preferred encoding. You can even set conditions for delivery of the report email, for example, to send the report only when ACV exceeds $10,000.
What are the benefits of this feature?
- Save time by viewing the report directly in your inbox instead of finding it in Salesforce
- No need to export the report manually each time every time you need it in Excel format
- Only get notified when certain conditions are met. Hence eliminating unnecessary noise.
What’s next for the future?
Per customer feedback, we plan to support an XLSX details-only export option in the future.
We’re also considering PDF attachments for dashboard subscriptions to make it easy for end-users who want to use dashboard subscription PDFs directly in their presentations or meetings.
How do I enable this feature?
This feature is slated to be Generally Available (GA) in Winter 21 and is in Open Beta in the Summer 20 release.
In order to sign up for it, navigate to Setup → Reports & Dashboards Settings and then opt into the Org Pref “Let users attach reports as files to report subscription emails in Lightning Experience”.
Do you have feedback to share? Let me know your thoughts by reaching out to me via email (ankita.dutta@salesforce.com), twitter (@adutta_sf), or Salesforce community (Ankita Dutta).
*Forward-looking statement
This content contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. If any such uncertainties materialize or if any of the assumptions proved incorrect, the results of salesforce.com, inc. could differ materially from the results expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements we make.
Any unreleased services or features referenced in this document or other presentations, press releases or public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase our services should make the purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. Salesforce.com, inc. assumes no obligation and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements.
Written by
Hi Ankita,
Great write-up. How do you handle data security and privacy concerns that are involved with sending reports as attachments over email?
Did Salesforce legal team have you put any guardrails on it?
Thanks,
Prashant
Hi Prashant,
We have approval from our security team for this feature. As long as the user has the necessary permission to export data and to subscribe, it should be fine.
Hi Ankita,
Great post!!!
I am facing an issue where all the report subscription emails go in the junk folder because they originate from a cryptic email address and have my own email address spoofed on top of it. Have you seen this behavior?
I’m experiencing this behaviour as well. Would be great if someone can post a solution.
Hi Ankita, as admin, how can I know which reports are being subscribed by other users of my organization? Is there a custom report type that I can use? Many Tks!
Hi Rita,
We haven’t built that functionality yet. As an admin, you can login as a user and see which reports they’ve subscribed to.
The Analytics Notification API can provide details on which reports are subscribed and by who (among other information).
https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.api_analytics.meta/api_analytics/analytics_api_notifications_reference_notification.htm#analytics_api_notifications_reference_notification
Hi Ankita,
Great post!
Thanks
Thomas Kuruvilla
is possible to send a dashboard via mail mantaining the dashboard format?
The reports received through subscription have 18 digit ids, but reports directly exported from Report Builder have 15 digit ids. How to get 15 digit ids through subscription?
Hi Krishna,
Can you tell me a bit about the use case? Why do you need it to be 15 digits?
I can’t speak for Krishna, but in my case I have a complex data analysis program written in Python that I run report exports through and I’d like to avoid the significant inconvenience of revising it to be 15 vs 18 agnostic (it currently uses the 15 because Python is naturally case-sensitive).
I feed the outputs of four Salesforce reports into the program and it is a time-sink and hassle to manually export them every time I want fresh results. Subscribing makes the export process *almost* painless, but one of the four reports is too large to receive as an attachment, so the “subscription” option just generates an email telling me to export directly from SF. Which leaves me with three subscription-generated reports (18-digit ID) and one manually generated export (15-digit ID) which then breaks my analysis code.
Not to sound too salty, but it’s kind of unbelievable that Salesforce wouldn’t have foreseen that using different ID conventions for two delivery mechanisms of the exact same report, without providing an obvious way for the user to specify a preferred convention, would be problematic. Even Excel-only users (presumably the main beneficiaries of the non-case-sensitive convention) would be inconvenienced by this oversight.
* To clarify — if all the exports were 18-digit, that would be fine; I wrote the code on the assumption that I would consistently be getting 15-digit exports, but the number doesn’t matter, just the consistency. The problem comes from some export tools generating 15 while others generate 18. The discrepancy is where the != issues arise.