Sending Sisense reports to people who don't open dashboards: three questions to answer first
Summary: Benjamin Nissim discusses effective methods for sharing Sisense reports with users who don't access dashboards directly. They highlight using email for recipients with Sisense logins and utilizing the existing Report Manager for those without. Key points include optimizing delivery options, addressing export contents, and ensuring recipients have what they need without unnecessary complexity. Suggestions involve checking the setup against specific requirements before seeking external solutions.
Sharing a dashboard works well when everyone who needs the numbers logs in to Sisense. The moment a report has to reach people who never will, most teams start looking for something new, when the answer is often already in the platform.
Disclosure: I work for a Sisense partner that builds add-ons, some of them for reporting. Nothing below is about those.
1. Do your recipients have Sisense logins, and is email fine?
If yes, dashboard sharing covers more than people remember. You "can configure Sisense to send periodic email notifications containing the dashboard inside the email's body or as a PDF attachment to your dashboard's Shared Users."
• Choose the email body over the attachment. Numbers in the message get read far more often than numbers behind a file.
• Let people own their schedule. "If you allow them, the Shared Users can configure their own subscription schedules and the delivery method."
• Plan around one limit. "Sisense can only email the entire dashboard." If a group only needs two widgets, give them a small dashboard of their own.
2. If not, is Report Manager already in your licence?
Check before building anything. It "comes installed together with Sisense", it is listed for the Grow and Enterprise tiers, and it needs a licence. It covers most of what sends people looking:
• Recipients who are not users. Reports can go to "a wide audience including non-Sisense users".
• Real schedules. Custom end dates, or a report that fires on an event through an API endpoint rather than on a clock.
• Destinations that are not an inbox. Files archived over SFTP "to a server designated on a per report basis".
It is also under active development. 2026.1.1 let every tenant in a multitenant system schedule reports, and 2026.1.2 certified its APIs to REST API standards. If you looked at it a while ago, it is worth a second look.
3. Do you know what your export actually contains?
The question almost nobody asks first. Sisense documents each of these, and most have a fix you can make today.
• Pivots in a dashboard PDF. By default "only the first page of each pivot widget is exported". Export the pivot widget itself and "multiple pivot pages are exported".
• Wide tables. They "are not scaled to fit the page". Designers can save the PDF format and orientation, so landscape is set once.
• Long tables. "Up to 1,000 rows to PDF. Larger and more complex tables may fail." Filter the widget down, or send the data as a file.
• Scripted widgets. Custom JavaScript "will not appear in Excel or CSV exports", so check the export rather than the dashboard.
The ninety-second test: open your last export next to the dashboard it came from, and compare the bottom of the table.
Where that leaves you
Yes to question 1, you are done. Yes to question 2, set up Report Manager first, because it is already installed. No to both, and question 3 has told you what the requirement really is, which is exactly the detail that gets a good answer in this forum.
If one of these turned up something you did not expect, reply with what you found. It will help the next person searching for the same thing.
