Settings

You find all your automatic reports under “Reports” in the main menu. Once you have reports, they will be listed here.

There are three ways of creating a new report, but we’ll only show you two of them in this chapter. The third will be shown in the next chapter. For now, let’s create a report using the button “New report”.

Give your report a name. We recommend that you use descriptive names for your reports, such as “Monthly report HR” to make it easier both for you to find the right report in the list but also for your colleagues to understand the data sent to them.

Once you have given the report a name and clicked on “Save”, the report is created and added to your list of reports. Now you can also more clearly see the information given to you in the list.

You can see name, language and frequency, all of which you can change.

You can also see when the report was last delivered and when the next delivery is. However, this report does not have a delivery date yet, but we’ll soon get that sorted.

Lastly, you can also see how many recipients there are for this report and how many charts it contains.

Edit automatic reports

This report is still empty, so last start adding some content and getting the settings right. To find the report settings, click on the report name.

General settings

Under the general report settings you can edit the report name, change the language and add a description of the report. The description is not necessary, but can be helpful for the recipients of the report.

There is also the option to use a date offset, but that is rarely used. If you want to read more about it, we have an article explaining how it works and when to use it.

Save your changes to move on to the content in the report.

Content

As you can see, there’s no content added to this report yet.

To add content, you need to go to “Data sources/UX-Surveys” and select which charts to include.

Under each chart, there is an icon with a plus sign on a piece of paper. That is the “Add chart to an automatic report”-button.

Click on the button and then select the report you want to add the chart to. As you can see, you can not only select an existing report, but you can also create a new report. This is the second way of creating a new report.

To add a new report here, write the name you want and press Enter. The new report is then added to the list of reports.

Select the report you want and add a description of the chart, if you want to. However, you can add or change the description later on.

The description will appear below the chart in the report. See image below for example.

You do not need to add information such as survey question in the description. That information is always included above the chart. For follow-up question, information about which respondents were asked the question is also included. See below for example.

Once you have selected a report and, if you wanted to, written a description of the chart, click on “Save” to add the chart to the report.

Repeat this with all the charts you want to add to the report.

You do not need to care about the order in which you add the charts, the date range, or what type of chart (pie, line, etc) you added. These are all things you can change in the report settings.

Something you cannot change and need to get right before adding the charts is which segment/segments to show. Whichever segment is shown in the chart you add to the report is the segment that will be shown in the report.

You do not need to use the same segments for the entire report. You can have some charts showing all respondents, and some that only show “Job applicants”, and so on.

Edit content

Once you have added all the charts you want, go back to “Report” and select the report you’re working on to get the last settings right. You can go straight to “Content” this time.

Now that the report has content added to it, you can fix the content settings. The first is the date range. For automatic reports, we recommend that you use “Last” and then the report frequency. For example, if you want a monthly report, the date range should be “Last 1 month” or “Last 30 days”.

You can compare your data to the previous period in automatic reports too.

Although there are many date options for reports too, you need to be more thoughtful about which you use as they may affect the report in an unintended way. To find out more about the date range settings for automatic reports, check out this article.

The report date range above the content will determine the dates for all the charts, but in some instances, for example if you have a trend chart, you may want specific charts to use a different date range.

When you open a chart, there is an individual date range option above the chart which overrides the general setting.

The best date settings for a trend chart is usually "Last 12 months" (or longer), but for more information, check out our article about date settings for automatic reports.

For trends, you also want to change to a line chart. You have the same display options here as you do when you look at your results.

The chart type you select here will be the chart type displayed in the report.

You can also add or edit the comment below the chart.

Lastly, if you added your charts without a particular order, now’s the time to structure them in the order you want. To move a chart, click on the three lines to drag and drop.

When you’re happy with the content, click on “Save”.

Delivery

The title is the email subject. Again, we recommend that you use descriptive titles to make it easier for you and your colleagues. For example, instead of “Report” you can use the title “Monthly report HR - Extellio web survey”.

Next up are the date settings for the delivery. Select the frequency you want, and then a start date. You can add an end date too, but that’s not necessary. If you select the start date 1 January 2024, the report will be delivered the 1st of every month until the end date.