A complete reimagination of reporting in Workfront, the new Reporting Canvas tool is nearing completion and will soon be available for public testing. In developing Reporting Canvas, we have worked hard to provide an experience that offers maximal flexibility coupled with an intuitive, modular design—so that users like you can most effectively leverage your own data in making and sharing reports. Through a new, unified report type that allows you to drag-and-drop nearly every element onto a limitless canvas, creating a visual data masterpiece will soon be easier than ever before.
This article contains information about how the beta will function and how your organization can help us improve Reporting Canvas before its official launch.
In developing Reporting Canvas, we have radically redesigned some features—and created some new ones from the ground up—for the purpose of streamlining report making. The following table outlines major features of Reporting Canvas in comparison to existing reporting tools, as well as their current release status:
For a chronological list of added features and resolved issues, see Reporting Canvas beta: release activity.
Feature Description | Legacy Terminology | Reporting Canvas Terminology | Status |
---|---|---|---|
Reports | Report | Reporting canvas | Released |
Dashboards | Dashboard | Reporting canvas | Released |
Tables | Details tab | Table block | Released |
Charts | Chart tab | Visualization block | Released |
Subtotals | Summary tab | KPI visualization | Released |
Drill path | Report viewer modal | Report viewer overlay | Released |
Columns | View tab | Table editing | Released |
Filters | Filter tab | Table editing | Released |
Groups | Group tab | Table editing | Released |
Field configuration (aggregations and conditional formatting) |
View tab | Table editing (column selected) | Released |
Resizing columns | Text mode | Table editing (column selected) | Released |
External content | External page | Web content block | Released |
Exporting | Report actions | More menu in viewer | Partially Released |
Sharing columns | Text mode | Field builder | Partially Released |
Calculated columns | Text mode | Field builder | Partially Released |
Chart styling | Chart tab | Visualization block (Style tab) | Planned |
Scheduled delivery | Report actions | More menu in viewer | Planned |
Granting report access | Report actions | More menu in viewer | Planned |
Unauthenticated dashboard access | Dashboard actions | More menu in viewer | Planned |
Editing report data | In-line editing | Summary pane | Planned |
Page filtering | N/A | Canvas filter | Planned |
The features listed here will be released as part of a tiered product release scheme. Features you have access to in this beta may not be available in the full release, based on your organization’s plan.
The Reporting Canvas beta will be available to all organizations that are on AWS, regardless of region.
The Reporting Canvas beta is completely optional, but may only be opted into by a Workfront administrator. To opt in as a System Administrator:
After your organization’s data is added to Reporting Canvas, other system administrators can choose to join on an individual basis in the same way (without waiting for data to be added again).
To opt in other users that are not Workfront administrators:
Select the Reporting (beta) icon in the Main menu of your Workfront instance.
Click on Reporting Canvas permissions.
Search for and select the specific users you want to participate.
Users that you grant access to Reporting Canvas will have access to all data in the system in a read-only capacity, regardless of their standard permissions to view this data.
Click Save.
Add the Reporting (beta) icon into the main layout template of each user that was selected. For more information, see Customize the Main Menu using a layout template.
Each user must then individually navigate to the Reporting (beta) icon in their main menu and accept the terms and conditions.
To submit feedback about the beta:
In short, migrating legacy reports won’t be available during the beta. However, it is a planned feature (with some caveats described below) for the official launch.
While the barrier to building new reports has been significantly lowered with Reporting Canvas, we understand that bringing over some of your existing reports and dashboards will help accelerate the adoption process. As such, we want to provide the tools and resources necessary to make sure you can bring over any relevant legacy items to ensure you start off on the right foot in Reporting Canvas. Since Reporting Canvas is such a radical change to the way current reporting works, however, it would be impossible to migrate every report or dashboard exactly as it is today.
Our current strategy for migration in the official releaseis to enable you to do the following:
Identify the reports and dashboards that are relevant
Select the reports and dashboards that you want to migrate, then click Migrate
This is a one-way migration. It creates a copy of the selected reports and dashboards to Reporting Canvas, leaving the legacy report or dashboard intact in the current reporting tool.
You can migrate the same report or dashboard as many times as you want.
In Reporting Canvas, make sure that all of the reports and dashboards you selected were migrated.
In order to provide the beta to our customers as early as possible, we have released it with only a subset of the many object types available in Workfront today. Below are the object types currently supported in the beta:
No. The beta uses a copy of your organization’s data that is populated into Reporting Canvas. While this means that you are safe to experiment during the beta without risk of impacting important data, it also means that in-line editing of data in Reporting Canvas will be unavailable until the official launch.
A Workfront administrator cannot opt out of the beta; however, non-system administrators can be removed by doing the following: