As promised, we will be highlighting feature updates and releases related to Reports and Dashboards through a blog series. For the second part of our installment, we discuss the ‘Attach .csv Files Report Subscription’ functionality.

This feature release is pretty straightforward: reports can now be generated more efficiently via email without the hassle of printing each page, thus making the reporting process more digital and seamless. Sounds modern and techie, isn’t it? But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

To guide you further on this feature, here is a sample case:

Burgeon Inc., an electronic components manufacturing company, sends out Production and Quality monitoring reports to their Regional Director weekly. They prefer to receive the reports as CSV files so they can easily search, filter, and leave notes to their hearts’ content while analyzing the report.

Promptly updating the key persons with important company metrics is one of the benefits of report scheduling and subscription. Without the hassle of manually running the report, the directors at Burgeon Inc. are on course with the latest status of their production sites, which allows them to deliver their products on time.

The best thing is, the Administrators no longer need to print out the reports and snail-mail them. Instead, they can use Salesforce scheduled reports to send emails with the report file to all subscribed users.

First Step: Report Subscription

The Administrator at Burgeon is responsible for setting up the report subscriptions. One of their weekly reports is configured like this:

Users can personalize their subscription settings such as the schedule of when the report will run, the recipients, and the user running the report.

The report runner setting has two options called ‘Me’ and ‘Another Person’. If the ‘Me’ option is selected, the logged-in user runs the report, and recipients see report data in the emailed report as the user. On the other hand, the ‘Another Person’ option can be used to specify another user who has the permission to run reports and access to the report.

Optionally, conditions can be added to the subscription settings. Recipients will be notified every time a specified condition is met:

Winter ‘21 Feature: Report Subscription Attachments

The Winter ‘21 release came with a feature that allows users to receive report results in CSV format as an attachment to the subscription email.

The email only contains the report name in the subject line and all row-level record details are inside the attached CSV file.

You may also notice that the view options available for the subscription email attachment are the same options for exporting a report: Formatted Report or Details Only. This sets how the report results will be presented in the CSV file.

The report subscription attachment feature makes sending report results seamless, efficient, and trouble-free. 

Before you forget! To enable the users to add attachments to the report subscription emails, an important permission must be granted in the Reports & Dashboards Settings:

Sending reports and acting on the results immediately has never been this easy with this feature in place! It sets up a more efficient workflow by eliminating the need to convert the report results into a more usable format.

Can’t get enough of useful system updates? Brace yourself for another feature highlight in our next blog update!