How Admins Can Mass Move Reports and Dashboards

Spoiler alert: we’re heading back to Classic to mass move reports and dashboards using drag and drop functionality.

Do I really want to be encouraging you back to Classic as an advocate and champion for Lightning?! Not really, but needs must. Last week I needed to move some reports and dashboards fast and I’d forgotten that we were able to do this in Classic without the need for tools like Workbench or Eclipse. When you’re in a time crunch and you’ve got multiple reports or dashboards to move then this is a really quick method.

Why?

I recently discovered a user had created a ton of reports and dashboards, then saved them to their private folders. They put a lot of effort into this work and excitedly sent the links to the finished dashboards to the rest of the team. The team clicked on the links and…well, nothing. Insufficient privileges.

The problem was easy to figure out and the solution was obviously to move these reports and dashboards into folders that were available to the team (oh and maybe do some refresher training with the user).

“Simple”, I said, except it wasn’t. I needed to move approximately 35 reports from the user’s private folder to another folder but I didn’t want to do this one by one.

In Lightning, to move a report, you edit it, click the drop down arrow next to Save and select “Properties”. From here you can select a new folder to store the report in. (Lightning I love you, but this is laborious!)

There must be an easier, quicker way to do this? There are several ways to mass move reports but most solutions online involved using Workbench or Eclipse. This is certainly a useful skill to learn but the initial effort of figuring out these tools was going to take longer than moving them one by one…which is why I want to remind us all that we had drag and drop functionality to do this in Classic!

How?

1. Switch back to Classic
2. Select the Reports tab
3. Locate the reports (or dashboards) that you want to move
4. Click on the report and drag and drop into the correct folder

This is a such a simple way to move reports and dashboard between folders. I wish they would bring this functionality to Lightning so I’ve included links to a few Ideas you can vote on below.

If you have hundreds (or more!) reports or dashboards that need moving, a much better solution is to take the time to get proficient using something like Workbench or Eclipse. With that in mind, I’ve included a few useful links on how to use these tools. Good luck!

Useful links

Salesforce Help: Move Reports Between Folders in Lightning Experience

Salesforce Help: Bulk Move Reports or Dashboards Using the Metadata API

Mass moving Reports from one folder to another using the Eclipse Force.com IDE

Idea: Mass move reports / Mass delete reports / Mass move documents / Mass delete documents

Idea: Update report names and move report folders via Data Loader