Copying, Saving, and Sharing BI Reports

In this article, we're going to dive into all the ways you can save and share reports in Virtuous BI. This will include saving fully custom reports as well as saving edited Best Practice reports. We'll also work through how you can create reports for personal use or for allowing team members access. Let's get to it!

Terminology

Before we get into how we save, it's important to clarify the terminology we'll be using in this article.

• My Documents: This is a folder that is specific to the user only and is not visible to other users.
• All Team: This is a folder that is available to all users in your organization.
  • Use this folder to share reports with your team.
  • To find this folder, you may need to search for it when saving.
• If you need clarification on any other Virtuous BI terminology, check out this support article

Best Practice Reports

You might find that our best practice reports are a great start, but perhaps you would like to do a little bit of tweaking to the elements in the report. In that case, you'll need to save your own copy of the original report to edit. To do this, open up the best practice report, then in the bottom right corner, select "Save As."

Once you've selected "Save As," you'll need to then decide if you want to save it to your "My Documents" or "All Team" folders and select the folder of your choice. You can also rename the report on this screen.

Now that you've saved your own version of a Best Practice Report, you can make edits to your heart's delight! 

Custom BI Reports

If you find yourself needing to build a custom BI report, you'll also need to know how to save that report. The report will automatically be saved upon creation to either your "My Documents," or "All Team" folders depending on whether or not you chose to share the report with others when creating the report.

After creation, the report will automatically save as you work on it - this is true whether you are building the report from scratch or customizing a copy of a Best Practice report. However, it will not publish the the work you've done automatically. This means that when viewing a report that is not in editing mode, you'll only see the work that has been published. You will see the changes you have previously made when you enter Edit Mode that were not published.

In order to make changes visible in the report, select the Publish button on the bottom right corner.

Sharing BI Reports

If you want to share a report with your team, this report will need to live in the "All Team" folder. There are several ways to get a report into the "All Team" folder, but whatever method you choose, you may need to search for the folder in the search bar when you choose the destination.

• Method 1: Moving a report
  • If you built a report in your "My Documents" folder and would like to move that report so that others on your team can see it, click the three lines in the bottom left corner of the report, select Move, then choose the destination of the "All Team" folder.

• Method 2: Save A Copy
  • If you built a report for yourself and would like to allow others on your team to have access to the report while also having a copy just for you, you can use Save As to create a copy of the report in the "All Team" folder.

• Method 3- Create in the "All Team" folder
  • When creating a new custom BI report, you have the option of choosing if you want to share the report so others can see it. Selecting this option creates the report in the "All Team" folder.
    • Pro tip: If you build a report in the "All Team" folder unintentionally, you can always follow method 1 listed above to move the report into your "My Documents" folder to make it unavailable to your teammates.

Now that you know how to save and share reports it's time to get building! Here are some other Virtuous BI articles to help get you going:

How Do I Download BI Report Data?

How Do I Filter a Virtuous BI Report?

How Do I Schedule Exports of BI Reports?