Saving and publishing Insight reports

This page only applies to reports made within our system — links to external reports are published automatically and must be deleted if you no longer want them to be visible on your reporting site.

Unsaved reports

When a report is first created, it exists only on your computer. If you close the browser window or leave the page, your work will be lost. To prevent this, use the control panel on the right hand side of the report editor to give your report a title, and click the "save" button. You will not be allowed to save a report unless it has a name.

Your report is now saved as a draft.

Draft reports

Draft reports are saved in your dashboard, but not visible anywhere else. You can work on them, or publish them, but only people who have access to your dashboard and the 'edit site contents' permission can see or edit them.

From here, you can publish the report, or create a private sharing link.

Note that reports do not auto-save – you need to click the 'save' button in order to update the saved version of the draft. You will be prompted to do so if you attempt to leave the page with unsaved changes.

Published reports

Published reports are visible on the "Report" page of your reporting site. Anyone with internet access and your reporting site URL can browse and read them.

Published reports can be unpublished at any time. This will return them to the draft state.

Reports with unpublished changes

If you make changes to a published report, and save them, these changes will not be immediately reflected on your reporting site. Instead, the new version will be available in your dashboard, where you can work on it with other dashboard users. When you're happy with the updates, click "publish changes" in the control panel in the editor screen. This will replace the published version with your new updated version. The report will again appear simply as "published" in the site content screen.

Note that, in practice, updates to reporting sites can take a few minutes to reach all users, so if you view the published version too soon after making an update, you may see the old version. This will resolve itself within a few minutes.

Buttons in the top bar

If you want to share a report with people who are not dashboard users, but do not want to make the report completely public, you can generate a private link. Reports with private links do not appear on your reporting site, but can be accessed by anyone with the link. The link is long and unguessable, but has no other security, so you must make sure not to share it publicly. If it does get released, you can either delete the private link (returning the report to 'draft') or generate a new private link. This will replace the old link, which will no longer work, and you will need to redistribute the updated link to anyone who needs it.

Private links cannot have "unpublished changes" — any changes made (and saved) to a report are immediately shown to people accessing the private link.

Note that, in practice, updates to reporting sites can take a few minutes to reach all users, so if you click the private link too soon after making an update, you may see the old version. This will resolve itself within a few minutes.

There is a "preview" button at the top of the editor screen. This will open a new browser tab containing a view of the current version of the page. This can be used to check how your report will look once published. You should not share the preview URL, as it will expire shortly after being generated.

You can preview a report at any stage, but it must have a name. Previewing will save your in-progress document.

Deleting reports

Above the saving and publishing control panel, there is a "delete" button. This will permanently remove a report from your dashboard, and from your reporting site if it has been published. All private links will also be removed. This is usually not what you want — in general we would recommend you to unpublish the report but leave the draft version in your dashboard for reference, unless it was (for example) a test report that you will never need to refer back to.

Duplicating reports

The 'duplicate' button allows you to create a copy of a document. It will prompt you for a title for the copy — by default this is "Copy of [current title]". Duplicating the document will create a new draft document in your reporting site. A link to the copy will appear in the confirmation toast.

All analytics charts will be duplicated with their original data — if you need the data updating, you must edit each chart to apply the new data.

This feature is designed so you can use (eg) last year's annual report as a template for this year's. You can also create your own template by creating a draft report which you duplicate to start future reports.

If you have multiple reporting sites, it is not currently possible to duplicate a report from one to the other — if you need to do this, copy and paste the report content into a blank report on the target site. All charts and tables will be preserved when you do this.