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How to Create an Interactive Report with Snapshots
How to Create an Interactive Report with Snapshots

Freeze & share a dashboard by taking a snapshot. Control who can view your snapshot, and receive notifications when someone does.

Updated over 5 months ago

Creating a snapshot is a way to lock the state of a dashboard and make it shareable. When taking a snapshot, you are freezing your dashboard data, settings, and layout. You can then customize the accessibility of a snapshot to determine who you’d like to share the snapshot with.

How to Take a Snapshot

On the control bar (when in Edit mode) click on the camera icon.

A dropdown will appear with two options: “Take Snapshot” and “Snapshot History”. Click “Take Snapshot.”

You have now initiated a snapshot, which will take a couple seconds to generate.


Snapshot Properties

After creating a snapshot, a panel will appear allowing you to customize the properties of the snapshot you have just taken.

Preview, Date Taken, and View Snapshot

The image at the top is a preview of the snapshot that you have taken.

The “Date Taken” field is the time and date at which the snapshot was generated.

The “View Snapshot” hyperlink will open the snapshot in a new tab.

Nickname

The “nickname” of the snapshot is the snapshot’s name (NOT the report).

This nickname will appear in the snapshot history, to help differentiate snapshots.

Share with

Invite anyone to view your snapshot securely, and track when they view it.

If someone does not have a Novus account yet, adding their email address to the "Share with" list will send an invite via email inviting them to create a (free) account and view your snapshot. A personal message can be appended using the “Message” textbox.

See who from the "Share with" list has viewed your snapshot by the checkmark next to their name. Otherwise, you will see an email icon, which lets you resend the invite.

To revoke someone from the "Share with" permission list, hover over the invitee’s name and click the X.

When your Link Visibility is set to "Restricted" (which is default), this "Share with" feature is the only way to make your snapshot accessible.

Share link

A snapshot URL is generated at creation of the snapshot, and will never change. Thus, changing snapshot settings and permissions will not alter the URL of the snapshot. See more in the "Link Visibility" section on how to determine who can see your snapshot.

Viewer Stats

"Total Views” denotes the total number of times your snapshot has been viewed—by anyone.

“See Details” breaks out viewer statistics by user (when known).

“Notify me when new user views” will send you an email whenever a new user (with a Novus account) views the snapshot for the first time.


Link Visibility

There are three levels of visibility that you can set your snapshot to.

Restricted

Only people who have been added to the “Share with” list can access and view the snapshot.

One must have a Novus account or create one (after being invited to a snapshot) in order view with this setting.

Note: Anybody with access to the report on the Novus platform will also be able to access the snapshots associated with the report.

Anyone with the link

Anyone on the internet with the URL can view the report. No login required.

When “Anyone with the link” is selected, the “Expire” option will be made available. On the specified expiry date, the report will automatically revert to “Restricted” and the security limitations will update.

Any existing Novus User

Any user with a Novus account will be able to view your snapshot. If someone does not have a Novus account yet, you can still add them to the "Share with" list, and they will receive an email invite inviting them to set up an account and view your snapshot.


Snapshot History

You can access the “Snapshot History” modal from the same dropdown from a report, under the camera icon.

The “Snapshot History” page holds all the snapshots that exist for the report.

Think of a snapshot as a “child” of a your “parent” report. The parent report can have many children snapshots as you'd like. Each snapshot’s properties and permissions are unique to that snapshot, and will not affect the parent report or sibling snapshots.

In the Snapshot History modal, you can edit a snapshot's properties—just click on a line to open the same settings modal as seen above.

Snapshots can also be updated or deleted by clicking the ellipsis menu icon in the top right.

Note that updating a snapshot will not change the URL of the snapshot, allowing you to push the latest updates in your dashboard to existing snapshots.


Snapshot Management Space

You can see all the snapshots that have been taken, as well as shared with you, in the snapshot management space of the platform.

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