7.3 Worklets, Dashboards & Sharing Reports

Dashboards

Dashboards consolidate key management information and actionable items into a single location. Workday delivers preconfigured dashboards for managers in distinct functional areas - Compensation, Recruiting, Onboarding - and you can create an unlimited number of custom dashboards.

Use the Maintain Dashboards report to run, edit, and delete dashboards. The same report configures worklets, announcements, and external links on the Home dashboard.

Applications provide quick access to dashboards, reports, and tasks from a landing page. A user's security permissions determine which applications are available - the Personal Information application is available to all employees, while My Team Management is available only to managers. Applications can be defined as required (users cannot remove them) or optional (users can add and remove them).

Worklets

Worklets are reports and charts configured on dashboards that give quick visual snapshots of important data. Workday-delivered dashboards include delivered worklets, which you can copy and modify, and you can enable custom reports as worklets.

Memorize the limits: a dashboard can have six tabs, and each tab can contain six worklets.

Report-based worklets are normally built on Matrix reports, because a worklet needs a summarized, visualizable result rather than a long list.

Discovery Boards

Discovery Boards let users explore data interactively - building visualizations, slicing by dimensions, and following a line of inquiry without editing a report definition. They suit analysts investigating a question, where a fixed report suits an audience consuming a known answer.

The Analytics and Reporting Hub

The Analytics and Reporting Hub is a centralized workspace for report authors and administrators. Its features:

• Centralized access to reporting-related tasks and information in one location
• Enhanced navigation - users can add a worklet for the hub to their global navigation menu
• Support for various tools - enabled for Worksheets, Discovery Boards, Prism, and Office Connect tasks
• User customization through overview pages

To enable it:

1. Ensure users who need access are in a security group with view and modify permissions for the View: Reporting and Analytics Hub domain.
2. After adding the users and security groups, enable the security policy.
3. Use the Configure Global Navigation task to add the hub worklet to the global navigation menu.

That three-step pattern - grant on the domain, activate, then surface in navigation - recurs throughout Workday. Administrators who complete only the first two steps produce access nobody can find.

Sharing a report definition

Sharing lets other people view and run your report. The options:

• Share with all authorized users - anyone who can access the report's underlying data
• Share with specific authorized groups and users - a manually selected list

The security rule that matters most: users running a shared report see the report results based on their security. Sharing a definition never widens data access. A constrained manager running a report you shared sees their own team's rows, not yours.

That single sentence resolves a large family of exam questions. Sharing a report is safe. What is not automatically safe is sharing report output.

Sharing report output is a different thing

When you schedule a report or report group, the Share tab shares the generated output file.

The behavior is fundamentally different:

When a report group executes, it runs using the security of the user who scheduled it. Shared users see the output files using the security of that user. Workday's own guidance: use the output sharing option with caution, as any user with whom you share report output will see the same output, regardless of their Workday security.

Sharing output requires access to the Report Output Sharing security domain, and shared users receive a notification with the file available on their My Reports page.

  SHARE DEFINITION            SHARE OUTPUT
  ────────────────            ────────────
  recipient runs it           scheduler ran it
  recipient's security        SCHEDULER's security
  rows filtered per user      identical file for everyone

Sharing a report group

The owner of a report group can share it so others can view the definition and schedule it. The options mirror definition sharing, with one addition worth noting: a user must have security access to all reports in the group to access the group. Sharing a report group also shares any saved filters on the reports, and Workday recommends mapping prompts to individual reports using a prompt set. When another user schedules the group, the reports execute based on the security of the user scheduling the group, not the group owner.

Enabling a report as a worklet

1. Build the report - typically Matrix for a visual worklet.
2. From the report's Related Actions, enable it as a worklet.
3. Add the worklet to a dashboard using Maintain Dashboards.
4. Secure it. Custom dashboards and custom worklets are custom items, and Workday provides 200 custom domains in the System functional area for exactly this purpose.
5. Confirm the six-tabs-by-six-worklets limit is not exceeded.

Recall the deletion safeguard from section 7.2: you cannot delete a custom report definition that is in use anywhere, including as a worklet on a dashboard. Remove the worklet first.