First experience with a public report as a replacement for public dashboards | XM Community
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I was a big fan of public dashboards and was disappointed when they were withdrawn but then I saw that reports could be made public and so I tried that out as a replacement for the first time.  Unfortunately, what I found was a very buggy product with many limitations:

  • Broken visualisations created by the import from the old results.  These are easily spotted because the right hand bar shows code for the field names where the page generation failed.  These cannot be resized, they can’t have titles edited and more.  I had to recreate about 10 visualisations to get around this.
  • Removing the title doesn’t remove the space where the title goes.
  • There are two places to set the decimal point, which took me ages to find. One on the settings for the report, which half does a global change and half doesn’t and then the hidden Options tab on a specific field in the right hand bar.
  • Column headers are misaligned.
  • The text of comments cannot be selected and copied.  This appears to be intentional!!
  • And the worst one of all, there’s no “pageless” format so you’re forced into unnecessary work of fitting things on pages when almost nobody left on the planet things in terms of pages for online dashboards. 

Do I need to switch to another survey product or is this ever going to be a quality product to rival the old public dashboards?

Hey ​@JayD,

Sorry for the less than stellar experience regarding the Public Report feature. I internally escalated your feedback and a software engineer got back to me with the following info:

Broken visualizations from import: You're absolutely right - this is a known issue with converting from the old Results to Public Reports. I know it's not ideal to have to recreate visualizations, and we appreciate your patience here. We're currently focusing our development efforts on the new Results Dashboard experience and will announce when improvements are rolled out. 

Title spacing issue: This sounds like you might be clearing the title text rather than fully removing it. Try going to Options → Remove Title, which should eliminate both the text and the space it occupied.

Decimal place settings: Modifying the decimal places in the report settings will apply a global change to all fields that have their widget-level decimal places set to Default. Otherwise, the widget-level decimal places overrides report setting. 

Text copying: Yes, click events were intentionally removed as an easy way to prevent interactions that trigger edit events. 

Page format concern: The primary purpose of printed reports is to be paginated, not as a substitute for dashboards.

One important clarification: Public Reports aren't actually intended as a direct replacement for Public Dashboards. Public Dashboards were always limited to certain account types due to pricing model considerations, and that hasn't changed. What did change was the move from legacy Results to the new Results Dashboard, which now has the same restrictions that Public Dashboards always had.

 

Thanks again for the detailed feedback - it helps us understand how people are using these features in practice!

Thanks for taking the time to respond Alonso.  Some additional notes:

  • On the title spacing issue, yes I’ve been removing the title the correct way.  I checked and it does not always happen so I've attached a screenshot of one example of where it does happen.  You can tell has happened because when the mouse is held over where the title would be, it highlights the blank line.  I've even included the drop down to show that the title has been correctly removed.
  • On the decimal place settings, if you add a new visualisation to a report with a default set to 2 then it does not use the default, setting it instead to 0, and you have manually reset it.
  • On text copying, I have no idea what you mean - how does allowing someone to select and copy on screen text cause an edit event in a read-only public report?
  • On the page format concerns, I understand that there are aspects of the old dashboard that you might not want to reproduce, the interactivity for example, but a pageless format is a much simpler ask than that.  I also understand that there are pricing concerns around public dashboards but AFAICT there is no way that I can pay for that as an add-on

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