Exporting and scheduling reports
A report is only worth building if it reaches the person who needs it. There are four ways out of the report viewer, and they answer different questions: download it now, email it now, email it every week, or give somebody the report itself.
Export
The Export button offers two formats, and both are produced in your browser from the report you are looking at.
Excel
Excel (.xlsx) writes one worksheet per section, named after the section. A list section becomes a header row and its rows. A summary section becomes the pivot flattened into a grid, with the row-group fields down the left, one column per column-and-value combination, and the totals you switched on.
It is a flattened matrix rather than a live Excel PivotTable, so what you open is the numbers as the report calculated them.
PDF gives each section its own page, and page one carries a cover header with the report name, the date it was generated, how many sections it holds and the total row count.
Charts survive the download, not the email
Worth knowing before you choose a format for a schedule. A PDF you download from the viewer includes your charts, because the browser can capture what it has drawn. A PDF that Teralo emails you does not, because it is rendered on a server with nothing on screen to capture. The tables are identical either way.
So a report whose point is a chart wants downloading and attaching by hand. A report whose point is its rows is happy on a schedule.
Send a snapshot
Send emails the report as it stands right now, as a PDF or a spreadsheet, to people you pick. It is the "here is where we got to" button.
Recipients are chosen from the active members of your own organisation, and that is a hard limit rather than a default: there is no free-text address field, and nobody outside the organisation can be added. Up to fifty at a time.
You cannot pick yourself. Use Export if you want your own copy.
Anyone who can view the report can send a snapshot of it.
Scheduled distribution
Schedule is the same email on a repeating basis. A report can carry more than one schedule, which is how the site team gets a weekly copy and the directors get a monthly one from the same definition.
Frequency
Four choices, and each has a fixed timing you do not pick:
- Daily, every day
- Weekdays (Mon-Fri)
- Weekly (Monday), every Monday
- Monthly (1st), on the first of the month
Six in the morning, in the time zone you choose
Every scheduled report is sent at 6:00 am, in the time zone set on the schedule. It defaults to your own, and the field takes a standard zone name such as Australia/Sydney. There is no control for sending at another hour, so the time zone is the only lever on when it lands.
The dialog shows the next send date on every schedule you have created, which is the quickest way to check a new one is set the way you meant.
Format and recipients
Each schedule carries its own format, PDF or Excel, and its own recipient list, drawn from the same organisation-members list the snapshot uses and with the same fifty cap and the same exclusion of yourself.
Pause rather than delete
A schedule can be paused and resumed. Pausing keeps the recipients and the settings; deleting does not. For a report that only runs during a phase of the job, pause it.
A schedule runs as the person who created it
This is the part that catches people out. The data in a scheduled email is fetched with the permissions of whoever set the schedule up, not the recipient's. Two consequences:
- If that person loses access to a tool, the section reading it arrives empty with a note saying access was lost, and the rest of the report still sends. The schedule is not switched off, so the fix is a permission rather than a rebuild.
- If that person leaves, check the schedules they created. A report that has been quietly arriving half empty is easy to miss.
Scheduling is project level
A project report can be scheduled. An organisation-level report cannot: its viewer has Export, Send, Share, Edit, Duplicate and Delete, and no Schedule. To circulate an organisation report on a cycle, send a snapshot when you need it.
Sharing a report
Share hands somebody the report itself rather than a file: it appears in their reports list carrying a Shared badge, and they open it live.
Two levels:
- View lets them open it, read it and export it
- Edit lets them change it as well
Sharing is again limited to active members of your own organisation, and someone already shared with drops out of the picker. They are emailed to say the report has been shared.
Sharing carries one real convenience: a recipient can open a shared report even without the view-reports permission. What it never does is widen what they can see. Every section still checks their own permission for the tool it reads, so a shared report showing you eleven sections may show them six.
One caveat on that convenience. Sending a snapshot and opening the schedule list both check the view-reports permission itself, so a recipient who has only the share will find those two refuse. Reading and exporting are the reliable half of a share.
What a recipient gets
The email names the report, who sent it, the project or organisation it came from and how many rows it contains, attaches the file, and links back to the report in Teralo for anyone who can open it.
Opting out
Report emails obey each person's own notification preferences, and someone who has turned report emails off is skipped silently: no email, no bounce, no warning to you afterwards.
That is why the recipient pickers mark anyone who has opted out. It is worth glancing at before you rely on a schedule reaching somebody. See Notification settings.
PermissionsHost only
Which of the four routes you get depends on which reports permission you hold. See The report builder for the full set and How permissions work for how they are granted.
- Can view reports and dashboards is enough to export a report and to send a snapshot of it
- Can create, edit, and share reports and dashboards is what scheduling and sharing need
- Can delete reports is separate again, and deleting a report takes its schedules and its shares with it
All three are host-organisation permissions, so everything on this page is a host action. A guest can receive a scheduled report as an attachment only if they are a member of the sending organisation, which by definition they are not: what reaches a subcontractor is a file somebody forwards.