[Status: Launched 🚀] Folders for reports

Hi everyone! We've had many internal discussions around this topic and here's the summary of the current approach:

• Our Product team reports that according to their research and interviews with Wrike customers, many users enjoy using spaces bookmarks for organising tools, including reports
• At the same time, we understand that bookmarks are not the same as folders for reports, as suggested in this thread, so we will treat this solution as a workaround for this ask
• I've changed the status here to Backburner for now 
• Our Product team is currently researching the future enhancements for the navigation, including the tools navigation, so we'll keep you posted on any updates

Big thank you for your continued feedback here! 

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Conviértete en un experto en Wrike con Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Conviértete en un experto en Wrike con Wrike Discover

Thank you Lisa for the update and for advocating to update the categorization of this request. I'll keep an eye out for further progress.

Wrike is so frustrating!  Yet another example of a request that is 5 years old that hasn't been implemented. We aren't asking for anything crazy, just a way to create folders for reports to easily organize them in the Reports section. This is a basic ask of any software for navigating/organizing content. Some of these users have 100+ reports. Has Wrike staff ever tried to work in these conditions and manage them on a daily basis? Maybe if they felt the frustration themselves something would be done.

Claiming that Bookmarks solve this is just an excuse. It has been made very clear by users in this thread that Bookmarks are not a solution for many reasons including effort, clunkiness, user permissions, organization and management, etc. I, for one, do not find it helpful at all to solve this problem. 

Oh, and let's not forget the same response that we see over and over; it's "backburnered". I get so aggravated that we can't seem to get Wrike to move on any of these items. What's that sound I hear? Oh, it's a can getting kicked down the road. Am I blue in the face? Yep, I sure am.  Hate to be the PITA, but it's the same story over and over and over, and thus my response is the same over and over. I can't wait for someday when Wrike actually implements a requested feature that is truly progress of the platform and not just tweaking visuals.

If we weren't so vested in Wrike with our userbase, I would be switching to another platform. 

I do understand your sentiment Jason Pontius, and will share your additional feedback with the team responsible for navigation. Thank you for your continued input here! 

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Conviértete en un experto en Wrike con Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Conviértete en un experto en Wrike con Wrike Discover

Hi Lisa - I'm not sure I understand which user base the team surveyed for the 'enjoyment' of bookmarks for organizing Reports - as you can see the passionate disagreement in this thread.  I appreciate the team looked into this, and I'm sure there are more valuable product features the team has prioritized.  As I'm sure you can understand, it's these seemingly small basic things that will eventually drive us to look at other tools that have this very basic feature.  Thanks for keeping us updated!  Looking forward to seeing it in a future product release.

We really appreciate your feedback Jaime Nwaobi, and I do understand that using bookmarks will not be a solution for everyone, which is why we decided to treat it as only a workaround. 

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Conviértete en un experto en Wrike con Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Conviértete en un experto en Wrike con Wrike Discover

I have a lot of different reports scattered throughout the Reports section, which makes it difficult for me to organize them based on similar reports or have easy access to them based on what type of report. Having folders within the Reports area would be so much more powerful. It saves time and keeps the area clean. I hope you add this feature.

This post is over 6 years old and there's 127 upvotes. This would be more of a priority for us over many of the recent Lightspeed updates. I'll have to assume this is somehow more complicated than it seems, so if having folders in the report section is fundamentally unfeasible, would it be possible to at least add folders to the "Tools" section of the sidebar menu? This would at least allow us to organize that long list of shared reports assigned to one space. It's getting a bit unruly there too—especially as many of the reports are available for everyone to see but only some people in the space regularly use them.

I totally agree here. This request is WAAAYYY overdue. Been way too long to not have a proper way to organize reports. WE NEED FOLDERS!

Agree as well on this one.

Thanks everyone, I'm flagging your feedback with the team now 👍

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Conviértete en un experto en Wrike con Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Conviértete en un experto en Wrike con Wrike Discover

This question was raised in 2017, come on now. How actively are you working on product development? Like several others have pointed out earlier, you should work more user-centered and review current feedback loops. The structure doesn't feel optimal.

Any update on this request? 

Happy coming NY all!

I know it's a holiday time for most of you, but we need your help and input to better inform our roadmap for 2024. In 2023, we introduced a redesigned UX and new navigation in Wrike that is effectively tools- and space-based now. Dashboards and reports can be organized into spaces, and frequently used ones can be pinned by users to be easily accessible via the sidebar. 

I realize those are not the true folders you asked about, but spaces and tools help organize your reports and dashboards into something more contextual. 

Could you please let us know about the following things:
- Have you tried to use space-based tools to organize reports/dashboards, and if yes, what worked and didn't work for you?
- What use cases of yours can be supported with folders, but not space-based tools?
- What are your typical patterns to access/navigate through the reports/dashboards? Is it a few reports you need to access frequently or something else? 

Thank you very much in advance and feel free to share whatever you believe it's important for us to know about your usage of reports and dashboards. 

We have tested space-based tools for organization, but we have ended up storing all reports in a single space. We would like the ability to create subfolders and save Reports/Dashboards within these folders. These folders could correspond to different departments, areas, etc. There should be flexibility in structuring/organizing our content.

While we don't have specific needs identified yet, during configuration, we realize that there is a challenge in organizing. Having many reports/Dashboards makes it difficult to locate what we are looking for. We would like the capability to click into a folder to find what we currently want to view.

Let me know if you need any further assistance!

The Space-based tools do not address the core issue, and that is organizing the reports in the reports area. Most of our project team works out of one Space, so if I were to locate all of the reports into that Space, I would wind up with the same problem; the Tools section would be big and unmanageable. I try to only put a few things in each Space Tools so that they are actually useful. If the Tools area gets too long, it becomes useless.

Here are answers to your questions:

- Have you tried to use space-based tools to organize reports/dashboards, and if yes, what worked and didn't work for you?

Yes, and these don't work well. It only is useful if you have a small number of items. Tools gets overwhelmed very quickly with calendars, reports, dashboards, etc. to where it becomes unmanageable and useless.

- What use cases of yours can be supported with folders, but not space-based tools?

Simple organizing of long lists, such as reports. It is very difficult to keep scrolling down the list of reports to find the one you want. We just want to be able to organize them like you would files on your computer. Put them in folders and make it more manageable.

- What are your typical patterns to access/navigate through the reports/dashboards? Is it a few reports you need to access frequently or something else? 

I need to navigate through a number of reports on a regular basis. Having one long list is annoying. I just need to organize them so I can navigate into the group that I want and easily find the one report I need at that time. 

The only way to accomplish this using Spaces, is to create many Spaces for the sole purpose of storing groups of reports. Does not seem like a good solution.

This request goes back 6 years. Can we please put it on the road map for 2024 finally? It's not that big of an ask. 

Thank you.

Echoing the other's comments and adding some additional notes:

- Have you tried to use space-based tools to organize reports/dashboards, and if yes, what worked and didn't work for you?
We do have separate spaces, but they are one for each function within our team. It certain does reduce the number of reports in a list, but the lists are still long given how many variations of reports have been made. Variations that separate out functions within a team, or by deliverable type, or by categories/themes.

- What use cases of yours can be supported with folders, but not space-based tools?
We have a long list of annual reports that we've made over the years and we need to keep them for historical reference or even the basis of new reports. In some cases, we still reference back to reports from prior years as we try and update the way they were formed for more apples-to-apples comparisons to current years as our metrics and the way we've done things has shifted over the time. So the lists get long due to variations and the chronological aspects.

- What are your typical patterns to access/navigate through the reports/dashboards? Is it a few reports you need to access frequently or something else? 
It depends, admins and managers usually go straight to the reports section because they want to see all the reports from all spaces to gather data and insights that supports other monthly/quarterly/annual reporting functions they must perform. Individual contributors tend to use the space-based tools lists because they work more in a single function and it does filter out reports that don't correlate to work they contribute to.

We also have individual Team Spaces but are cross-tagging all Projects to a Departmental Space for visibility/collaboration/reporting mainly because of the Tools section and the ability to house each team's Reports/Dashboards/Calendars/Workload Charts in one location.  The users do love having a dedicated area for "all the reports" for their Team, and as an Admin, it keeps sharing permissions clean and also allows for projects to inherit team-specific custom fields for reporting ..... but this approach is difficult to maintain as re-orgs happen.  We'd love to only have departmental spaces (and not also a space for every individual team in the department) but then the Tools section would be unwieldy and there's no way to organize.  I'd almost love to put the Folder Structure in the Tools section of the space so I could group by team, or portfolio, or audience (e.g. executive reporting) but then we'd want to cross-tag reports to multiple folders within Tools.  This would at least help us not to have so many Spaces (I think we're at ~45 spaces for ~500 users).  

- Have you tried to use space-based tools to organize reports/dashboards, and if yes, what worked and didn't work for you?
It causes the need for too many spaces (spaces at a granular Team level) which are difficult to manage over time, with re-orgs, and become complex as the account size grows across the enterprise. 

- What use cases of yours can be supported with folders, but not space-based tools?

We have so many space-based tools (we love data!) that we need folders to organize them

- What are your typical patterns to access/navigate through the reports/dashboards? Is it a few reports you need to access frequently or something else? 

End Users typically look in the Tools section of Spaces.  For a Team Member, that works fine, but when they're a Leadership Team member and have access to multiple spaces they don't remember which Space it's in, so they usually Search or attempt to scroll through the Reports section which is difficult.  Leadership will usually ping an Admin for a link to "that report" and then they bookmark it on their browser.  I want to create a Leadership Folder for Reports that can be their go-to.

Hi Justin Fuller Davide Bellman Jason Pontius Meredith Selden and everyone else. 

We are looking into this this year. Your feedback here is amazing. Would you be happy to jump on a short call with me to review some design proposals we have?

https://calendly.com/mike-minovsky/chartview

Best,
Michael, PM for Analytics

Michael Minovsky Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Conviértete en un experto de Wrike con Wrike Discover

Michael Minovsky Wrike Team member Conviértete en un experto de Wrike con Wrike Discover

Hello -- just wondering if there is an update to this request and the outcome of the call to share design proposals?

Nancy, it's on our roadmap for 2024, but we are not ready to share any details yet. We'll provide updates in this thread when we have them and invite people into the beta test for this functionality to collect early feedback. 

Please add this feature. My report view is a mess and I can't find anything quickly.

Hey Ali Moses, as @... mentioned above, this is on our radar, but we can't share on details it just yet. We'll keep you posted 👍

Elaine Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Conviértete en un experto de Wrike con Wrike Discover

Elaine Wrike Team member Conviértete en un experto de Wrike con Wrike Discover

- Have you tried to use space-based tools to organize reports/dashboards, and if yes, what worked and didn't work for you?

All the time.

From what I've seen with my customers, if the space-based tools had the ability to create folders to group the tools under, then it would solve all the navigational problems they currently have. Otherwise, like many have said above, it's simply putting the same problem in a different area. Folders in the space-based tools or folders in the reports section, that is the question...

Another help would be if you could actually make use of the groupings you can make in the bookmarks section by :

- having the groupings appear in the space overview (as folders or collapsible/expandable groupings); and

- giving more flexibility in how the bookmarks are displayed. It is currently limited to the first x bookmarks. Why not let the space admin choose how large the bookmarks section is? Or even let the bookmarks section be the default page for the space overview? 

Without the above, the bookmarks are too much "out of sight out of mind" to really fix the issues highlighted by everyone earlier.

Hi Patrick Gilbert, thank you for your detailed comment 👍 I've passed your questions and suggestions on to our relevant team.

We'll keep you informed in there are any updates regarding this feature ✅

All, we have recently released functionality of sections and parameterization. The first one makes it possible to reorganize big dashboards into more organized and manageable sections as well as consolidate them.  The second one makes it possible to have a single dashboard instead of many similar ones based on the same template. I hope that those changes would easy your pain of dealing with long list of dashboards and reports while we are working on other improvements in that area in H2.

@...  I don't feel that dashboards fix the report organization problem. These are not directly related. Yes, you could build dashboards to reflect similar data to the reports, but to me it's not the same thing. And it does not help provide an organizational structure for report data.

Jason, that's true. Those changes do not impact reports in any way, but this thread got used to discuss folders for tools in Wrike in general and with the recent changes in dashboards it's now possible to have a single dashboard where 5, 10 or even 50 were needed before. It's still on our roadmap to provide a better way to organize tools and I'll keep everyone posted.

Looks like this is a long-time request! I would especially love to see all "tools" (dashboards, reports, etc) given the ability to organize into folders into the space, or to organize the tools into folders in the tools space. We have so many reports and dashboards under the tools category, it is getting confusing for our users! I would to provide more organization options for our users. Thanks Wrike!