Metabase: Attach full table CSV to pulse?

[key88sf]

Feature request: Ability to send the entire query results as a CSV (or maybe inlined table in email) on an email pulse. Many of our users want the report data but don't actually use (or need to use) Metabase itself. It would be great to just have the pulse send the entire set of results as a CSV for them to look at, instead of just linking back to the metabase card.

⬇️ Please click the 👍 reaction instead of leaving a +1 or 👍 comment

[solomongifford]

We need this as well.

[zwalden]

Would love this over here; with the limited role management (so far? am I missing something?) it would be absolutely great to send a CSV to a user, or maybe even random email. It would prevent the need for them to have access, and still get analytics/data sent to them.

Edit: would be just as nice to just have those pulses have an option for filesystem (so: slack, email, filesystem) -- we could then setup a separate tool for handling said files?

[tlrobinson]

Perhaps we could add a little ".csv" button on the right of each item the pulse card picker, similar to the date grouping picker in the query builder.

[salsakran]

big +1 on this from my conversation with a heavy user (@HelmiRifai )

[calleo]

+1

[martinlee556]

+1 too.

[JonatanRoose]

+1

[alenave]

@tlrobinson I am not able to locate the button, please help me out
Thanks

[davidjhpgcc]

+1 This is highly needed

[vsreddy1602]

+1

[anthonysexton]

+1

[salsakran]

Hey, could everyone who's +1'd chime in with a bit of color around what they're planning on using this for?

We're looking into this, and the specific questions are --

• Would you still need this if you could give the people you'd send the csv a locked down account?
• Would you still need this if you could mark a question or dashboard as "public" and have the recipient access the csv without a Metabase user account?
• Are you sending these CSVs to people inside or outside your company?

If you still need this for non-permissions related reasons, could you elaborate a bit about the use case?

paging @anthonysexton @vsreddy1602 @davidjhpgcc @alenave @JonatanRoose @marketingnerds @calleo @zwalden @solomongifford

[key88sf]

@salsakran :

Would you still need this if you could give the people you'd send the csv a locked down account?

Yes. We don't want most of these people to deal with ever logging in.

Would you still need this if you could mark a question or dashboard as "public" and have the user login?

Yes. Same as above.

Are you sending these CSVs to people inside or outside your company?

Currently only inside.

[salsakran]

Can you elaborate a bit on what kinds of reports you're thinking of? Size of csv, etc? Just trying to get a handle on the underlying business process/info handoff this automates.

[key88sf]

@salsakran Similar to my original description at the start of this request. We have a lot of "non-tech" users who have a tough time understanding Metabase itself, and really just need to get some weekly/daily report data which they plug into Excel or Google Sheets.

Typically these are relatively small sized CSVs....on the order of 10-100 rows, though occasionally they might be larger. I could see having a "max-row-size" or "max-file-size" limit to this feature as well if that could help.

[davidjhpgcc]

1a. Yes because the users at our company demand an email. They are not willing to login to anything. They want the information to simply show up in their email when there is work to do.

1b. Trying to remember a login and password is asking too much for lower level employees.

1c. Every time a new employee is hired or leaves there is too much login and password maintenance for IT. It is easier to send one email to one group email address vs creating and removing logins all the time.

1d. The email serves as a reminder that there is work to do. It is like an alarm clock.

All reports are sent internally.

Re size, it would be ideal if you can allow as large as possible. Some of our reports are 10MB csv or xls attachments with 100,000 rows.

[davidjhpgcc]

One more thing, also needed is an option whether or not to send that email if results=0. Some users want an email when there are 0 results, some do not.

[anthonysexton]

For us, these are daily reports for teams like finance who get different extracts at points in time for various reconciliations etc.

Would you still need this if you could give the people you'd send the csv a locked down account?

Yes.

Would you still need this if you could mark a question or dashboard as "public" and have the user login?

Yes

Are you sending these CSVs to people inside or outside your company?

Inside

We don't want them to have to log into another system just to get what they are after. Another option might be a link in the email to click and download but if the link expired etc. then they'd probably end up needing a login to Metabase anyway which would defeat the purpose of what we're trying to achieve here.

Re. Size - Sometimes they can be pretty big. Maybe a file size cap would be useful here to stop it from junking up inboxes but this would need to fall back to something should a report be bigger than what's allowed.

Historically have used Pentaho for things like this which become set and forget and make it easy to satisfy new raw data reporting requirements for different teams as they arise.

[JonatanRoose]

Would you still need this if you could give the people you'd send the csv a locked down account?

Yes, we are sending them to external people. We are using the SSO of Google with our domain. Therefore we need to be able to send specific information to outsiders without them having access to our dashboards.

Would you still need this if you could mark a question or dashboard as "public" and have the user login?

Yes

Are you sending these CSVs to people inside or outside your company?

Most of the time outside.

[pdiniz13]

+1

Hey, could everyone who's +1'd chime in with a bit of color around what they're planning on using this for?

We're looking into this, and the specific questions are --

Would you still need this if you could give the people you'd send the csv a locked down account?

Yes

Would you still need this if you could mark a question or dashboard as "public" and have the recipient access the csv without a Metabase user account?

Yes

Are you sending these CSVs to people inside or outside your company?

Both

If you still need this for non-permissions related reasons, could you elaborate a bit about the use case?

Would be using this to send out weekly/monthly reports that user can just download and view in excel or google sheets.

[rafaelveloso]

+1

[alexanderbez]

+1

[edmarriner]

+1

[t1ag0]

Would you still need this if you could give the people you'd send the csv a locked down account?
yes
Would you still need this if you could mark a question or dashboard as "public" and have the
yes
recipient access the csv without a Metabase user account?
yes
Are you sending these CSVs to people inside or outside your company?
both.

Most business user do not want to deal with external tools, they just want a CSV to work it on Excel on their laptop. I offer them very complete Tableau Dashboards and most of them ignores them.

[noamgat]

+1

[dsmegha]

+1

[MathiasDL]

+1

[OnShiftJT]

+1 especially around emailing or saving the full results in a shared folder

[camsaul]

Hey everyone, one way we prioritize issues is by sorting them by the number of 👍 reactions. So instead of leaving +1 or 👍 comments, please just upvote by adding a reaction.

[brnt]

• We, too, want to send reports to folks with no access to our Metabase dashboards.
• Lots of people copy-paste data into spreadsheets for integration into their own reports. Having that data waiting for them on Monday morning (without admin intervention) would be a huge win.

[orware]

I was also a bit surprised by the lack of functionality here when trying it a few minutes ago for a question I had created which had maybe 7-10 fields in it.

The email only included the first 3 columns (all of which did not include the key information needed) even after I made some adjustments to the question itself and sent another test email.

Currently on our campus we use the evisions' Argos Reporting tool for most of our reporting needs, plus we also have iDashboards, though it has limited usage at the moment. Argos has good functionality for sending data via email so having a bit more functionality in this regard would definitely be handy for Enterprise groups using the software. Also, there didn't seem to be an option to provide a required param when I tried including a test question I had created that had one (it simply didn't work at all for including into the Pulse). Having the option to include an end date for the pulse might be useful for those pulse that are time sensitive and then the organization moves on to something else.

[dsmegha]

👍

[key88sf]

@salsakran What is the status of this? Can this be done for next version? 🙏

[dsmegha]

Would love to have this in the next version.

[doodlebro]

This is over a year old, any update on this functionality being added?

[dannyeuu]

There is someone that can do this with Clojure? It not my ability.

[mokra]

will it be possible to format the CSV file?

[dannyeuu]

Thanks @senior

[rodolfoviolac]

+1

[camsaul]

Hey everyone, one way we prioritize issues is by sorting them by the number of 👍 reactions on each issue's description. So instead of leaving +1 or 👍 comments, please just upvote by adding a reaction to the issue description.

[mazameli]

@rodolfoviolac this was implemented by https://github.com/metabase/metabase/pull/6556 and will be included in our next release, which will be coming out very soon.

[pygeek]

+1

[mazameli]

In case anyone missed the memo, this feature has been built and is available for use in the latest version of Metabase which just came out yesterday!

https://metabase.com/blog/Metabase-0.28/