Sharing a Dashboard
Sharing a Dashboard
The Share action sits in the top-right corner of every dashboard, and it's the feature most people discover first — usually because they want to send a screenshot to their manager. It does considerably more than that.
There are two levels of sharing in CRM Analytics, and it's worth separating them in your head right away:
Dashboard-level Share
Acts on the whole dashboard — access, the Chatter post, the URL, a full-page image, and print. That's this lesson.
Widget-level Share
Acts on one chart or table — annotate, download data, explore, subscribe. Covered in the lessons that follow.
Granting access
The first tab of the share dialog is about who can open the dashboard at all. You pick a user, group, or role and give them a level of access — typically Viewer for a business audience, Editor or Manager for someone who needs to change or re-share it.
Worth remembering: dashboard access is not the same thing as data access. Sharing the dashboard lets someone open the page; what they see inside it is still governed by the dataset's sharing inheritance and any security predicate you've set. Two people can open the same URL and legitimately see different numbers.
Posting to Chatter
The share dialog can push the dashboard straight into a Chatter feed — your own, a colleague's, or a group's. You type a message, pick the destination, and post.
This is genuinely useful and genuinely underused. A dashboard that gets announced in the sales-ops Chatter group with a sentence of context ("new pipeline health dashboard, refreshed nightly at 6am") gets opened. One that gets emailed as a link with no context does not.
The URL — and why it's smarter than it looks
The share dialog gives you a URL you can copy. The important detail is that the URL doesn't just point at the dashboard — it encodes the state you're currently looking at.
- 1
Filter the dashboard first
Make your selections — a region, a quarter, a product line. Get the screen to the exact cut of data you want your colleague to see.
- 2
Open Share and copy the link
The generated URL carries that state, not just the dashboard ID.
- 3
Send it
Your colleague opens it and lands on the same filtered view, not the default one — assuming they have access to the dashboard and to the underlying rows.
This solves the most common friction in analytics conversations: "look at the West region in Q3" turning into three follow-up messages about which filters to click. Send the state instead.
Downloading as an image
The image option renders the dashboard as a picture you can drop into a deck, a document, or an email. It captures the dashboard as currently filtered, so the same "set the state first" habit applies.
It's a snapshot, though — the moment you export it, it stops being live. For anything recurring, a subscription (later in this section) is a far better answer than a manual image every Monday.
Print is the option people miss. It doesn't just fire the browser's print dialog on the on-screen layout — CRM Analytics re-lays out the dashboard into a print-friendly arrangement first, so widgets aren't clipped at page boundaries and the whole thing fits sensibly on paper.
From there, choose Save as PDF in your browser's print dialog and you have a shareable document. For executives who want a monthly PDF in their inbox, this is the manual version of what a subscription automates.
Sharing gets a dashboard in front of people. The next step is getting the dashboard to reach out to them — which is where notifications and annotations come in.
Discussion
No comments yet — be the first to start the discussion.