If you have a wide-ranging project team that needs to be able to view your sheet without logging into Smartsheet, then you can publish the sheet. That means you’re making the sheet available for anyone to view (and perhaps edit) with a public URL. You can also embed HTML source code into a Web page so that the sheet can be viewed (or edited) there.
Since the URL or the embedded sheet is publically available for anyone to see, be very careful with this feature. You don’t want confidential information falling into the wrong hands. This is why the sheet owner and admin users are the only ones who can publish a sheet.
To publish your sheet, just follow these steps:
Log in to Smartsheet and open the sheet you want to publish.
Click the Publish tab at the bottom of the sheet. You see the Publish Options dialogue box (see Figure 1).
Choose the level of access you want to give those who can view the sheet publically.
Read Only — HTML: This option shows only the data of the sheet, without the ability to download files or discussions. Viewers also can’t make any changes. When you choose this option, the screen changes to display the public URL, which you can copy and paste into an e-mail to share, as well as the embed code, which you can place in the HTML source code of a Web page.
Read Only — Full: This option still doesn’t allow changes to be made, but it enables viewers to download files and see discussions. When you choose this option, you see the public URL and embed code. You can also set the default view for the sheet (grid or calendar) and whether to show or hide the left toolbar.
Edit by Anyone: This is perhaps the scariest of all the options. This enables anyone to make changes to the document. It’s like giving the world Editor permissions to the sheet. Be very careful! When you choose this, you see the same screen as in Read Only view.
iCal (Calendar): This option enables viewers to add the dates in the sheet to their non-Smartsheet calendars.
When you’re finished, close the dialogue box.
Figure 1: Publishing your Smartsheet.
Source: smartsheet.com
When you publish a sheet in Read Only — Full or Edit by Anyone mode, you may notice that the public URL and the URL in the embed code show “https://” — with an s — rather than “http://”. What this means is that Smartsheet is using SSL (or Secure Socket Layer) to encrypt the data that is passed from Smartsheet to the viewer’s Web browser. This is a way to keep the data private during the transfer. Read Only — HTML gives you the option of using either a secure (SSL) or non-secure (non-SSL or http://) data transfer. When in doubt, use SSL.