Broadcasting allows you to send a report or dashboard to one or more users via email, based on a defined schedule and set of rules. A personal broadcast works the same way, except it can only be sent to the person who defined the broadcast.
Dashboards can be broadcast as a link or as a PDF attachment.
Reports can be broadcast as HTML, CSV, DOCX, PDF, TXT, XLSX or as a link to the report, depending on the content within.
The option to broadcast must be enabled for a user's role before they can use this feature.
Note: If broadcasting or sharing reports with tabbed co-display content, you must first export the report into an XLSX file, and then schedule the broadcast. You need not use the exported file, but simply create a copy.
Administrators must configure the sender’s email address for content scheduled for broadcasts. This is done via the Email settings on the Configuration page.
The following steps show how to broadcast a report. A dashboard uses the same process, but the Broadcast button is located further right on your screen.
1. Ensure your report or dashboard is active (not in draft mode).
2. Click the Broadcast button in the main navigation menu (or for broadcasting a dashboard, look further right).
3. Click Create New and select the Broadcast option(to send to many) or the Personal Broadcast option (to send to yourself).
4. The Broadcast window will open, with a number of options, described below.
A broadcast email can only be sent if recipients have been defined. One or more recipients can be selected for a boadcast.
Note: this step is not available for personal broadcasts.
Recipients can include individuals and groups, as shown in the table below.
User | A person that is a registered user of Yellowfin. |
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Group | A group of users that have been setup within Yellowfin. This option allows you to send a report to multiple users at once. |
Email Address | You can insert an external email address so that the report can be sent to external users. Ensure that it is a valid email address. Note: this function depends on your licence options. |
Report | You can select a report that already contains email addresses for broadcasting. The email addresses don’t have to belong to Yellowfin users. To fully customize the list of recipients, you can perform further filtering by clicking on the Advanced button and adding a report there instead. Here, other columns in this report can be linked to the main report as filters, resulting in a uniquely filtered report sent to each email address. Note: the column that contains the email addresses in a report must be formatted as ‘Email’ to be displayed in the list. To do this: |
Broadcast reports are run for each of the multiple recipients separately, taking into account their access filters, languages or other factors. However, to conserve memory usage and system performance, you can configure it so that each recipient’s report is delivered as soon as it’s generated (instead of waiting for all the recipients’ reports to get done before sending them together). See the configuration to do this here.
If you're using Yellowfin 8.0.10 or later, you can customize your title based on filter values. This might be useful if you send hundreds of emails from a single broadcast job that contains specific filter values. Rather than all of them having the same title, you can use filter tags to help identify different broadcast content.
For example, if you send a country-specific report weekly without a filtered title, the title would be the same for all reports (eg, "Weekly sales report for your country"). If you send that report with a filter tag for country, the title would be different for each country (eg, "Weekly sales report for United States", "Weekly sales report for Germany" and so on). This can reduce administration effort, making it easier to locate a sent email from a long list of emails if the titles are not all the same. From the recipient's perspective, they benefit from a more descriptive title.
Choose between two types of filter tags, depending on your needs. The table below provides some scenarios and examples
and remember, you must have at least one filter value set for a filter for it to display any values.
Filter | [filter] | [filterDetail] |
---|---|---|
Filter format | [filter:<filter title>] | filterDetail:<filter title>] |
Filter example | [filter:Camp Region] | filterDetail:Camp Region] |
Filter result if there is no filter for Camp Region | Camp Region In List | |
Filter result if there is a single filter value (Australia) set for Camp Region | Australia | Camp Region In List Australia |
Filter result if there are multiple filter values set for Camp Region | Australia, Europe, Asia | Camp Region In list Australia, Europe, Asia |
Example of filter when used with title text | Weekly sales report for Australia | Weekly sales report for Camp Region In List Australia |
If you're broadcasting a report and it contains filters, you can select which of these are applied to the broadcast.
The options include:
If your report uses Source Filters, the broadcast will also be filtered by the Source Filter, as well as whatever filters were defined above. If the report has been sent to an external email address rather than a defined Yellowfin user, the recipient will inherit the Source Filter from the user who defined the broadcast.
Note: in order for a user to Broadcast a Source Filter report to recipients not defined in the source filter, they will require the following role permission to be enabled.
A delivery rule is used for exception reporting. If you wish to send a report only if it meets certain criteria (for example: revenue is less than 100,000) then you will need to add a rule.
The last step is to define the schedule for your broadcast.
The send frequency is highly flexible. For example, monthly reports can be based on a certain day of the month, like this:
...or a certain day of a certain week within the month, like this:
Select 'Once' as the frequency to send out the broadcast as soon as possible. |