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Send a report to Google Drive

Have a report delivered into a shared drive — on a schedule, or whenever someone clicks a button in a workbook.

Before you start: someone needs to have connected the drive first. If Google Drive doesn’t appear as a delivery method, that hasn’t been done yet — see Connect Astrato to Google Drive.

There are two ways to send, and you pick the drive at the moment you set the delivery up.

  • On a schedule — from Reporting. Use this when a report should arrive regularly, or once at a set time.

  • From a button — from inside a workbook, using Actions. Use this when someone should be able to send it themselves.

On a schedule

  1. Open Reporting from the left-hand menu.

    The Reporting item in the Astrato left-hand menu, below Workbooks, Collections and Data + AI

  2. On the Reports tab, click New Report.

    The Reporting schedules page on the Reports tab, showing the report limit and the New Report button

  3. On the General tab, name the schedule and set Delivery method to Google Drive.

    Then choose the connection you want under Google Drive Integration.

    The New Schedule dialog on the General tab, with Google Drive chosen as the delivery method and an integration selected

    Leave Custom directory path empty to use the folder already set on the connection, or enter one to put these files somewhere else in the same drive.

    Note: the path is a folder inside the drive that’s already connected, written like Reports/2026. It doesn’t change which drive files go to.

  4. On the Attachments tab, choose the Workbook and the Report, then pick a File Type.

    The Attachments tab of the New Schedule dialog, with workbook, type, report and file type selected

    File name is optional. Leave it blank and Astrato names the file after the report.

  5. On the Frequencies tab, set how often it should run and in which timezone.

    The Frequencies tab of the New Schedule dialog, set to run daily at midnight in a chosen timezone

  6. Click Save.

Result: the file appears in the shared drive when the schedule runs.

A Google shared drive containing the delivered report as a PDF, with its size and the time it arrived

From a button

Use this when the person looking at a workbook should be able to send the report themselves. It takes longer to set up than a schedule, because you’re building the behaviour rather than filling in a form.

If you haven’t used Actions before, it works like this. You describe what should happen using blocks. The list on the left holds every block available; the space on the right is where you assemble them. You find a block by typing part of its name in the search box, then drag it out of the list and drop it onto the space — nothing is added by clicking. Blocks have slots, and you build the behaviour by dropping blocks into each other’s slots so they nest.

For this you need four blocks: two that define the report, and two that say when to send it.

Add the button

The action listens to something on the sheet, so that something has to exist first.

  1. In the workbook, click Controls in the left toolbar.

    The Controls button in the workbook toolbar, with a tooltip reading Add buttons and text inputs

  2. Choose Button from the panel, then place it on the sheet.

    The Controls panel open, with the Button control highlighted among the available controls

    Give it a label that says what it does — Send to Drive is clearer than Click here.

Build the report

  1. Click Actions in the left toolbar.

    The Actions button in the workbook toolbar, with a tooltip reading Create advanced actions

  2. Search for report and drag the Define Report block onto the space.

    Once placed, it reads Report: with Public and Initial sheet beside it.

    Name the report here. That name becomes the file name in the drive, so give it something a person would recognise in a folder — Customer LTV Report rather than Report 1.

    The Define Report block named Customer LTV Report, with Public ticked and Initial sheet set to Home

    The Actions panel with report typed in the search box, and the Define Report block highlighted on the canvas

  3. Search for screenshot and drag Add sheet screenshot to report into the slot inside the Define Report block.

    The Actions panel with screenshot typed in the search box, and the Add sheet screenshot to report block highlighted

Say when to send it

  1. Search for when and drag the When block onto the space.

    There are two of them. Take the one whose first dropdown reads Object name, not Object type. Object name points at one particular button; object type would fire for every button on the sheet.

    The Actions panel with when typed in the search box, showing two When blocks, with the Object name version highlighted

  2. Search for report delivery and drag the Report Delivery block into the slot inside the When block.

    The Actions panel with report delivery typed in the search box, and the Report Delivery block highlighted with its fields empty

Result: four blocks, nested into two. The arrows below show what goes where — the screenshot block sits inside the Define Report block, and Report Delivery sits inside the When block.

Two assembled block groups, with arrows showing the screenshot block dropping into the Define Report block and the Report Delivery block dropping into the When block

Fill in the details

Everything from here is choosing from dropdowns.

  1. In the When block, open the first dropdown and pick your Button.

    The first trigger dropdown open, offering Button and Filter Bar, with Button selected

  2. In the second dropdown, choose On click.

    The second trigger dropdown open, offering On click, On hover and On hover exit, with On click selected

    Important: use On click and nothing else here. On hover would send a report every time somebody’s mouse passed over the button.

  3. In Report Delivery, choose the Report type.

    The Report type dropdown open, offering PDF Report, Excel Report and Powerpoint Report, with PDF Report selected

  4. Pick the Report you defined in step 4.

    Custom file name is optional and overrides the report’s name for this delivery only. Leave it blank and the file takes the report’s name — Customer LTV Report.pdf. Use it when the same report goes to different places under different names.

    You can also adjust the resolution here.

    Tip: leave Use applied filters set to True if the file should match what the person is looking at when they click. Set it to False to always send the unfiltered report.

  5. Under Delivery methods, set Delivery method to Google Drive.

    The Delivery method dropdown open, listing Gmail, Office365, SendGrid, Brevo, Slack, Teams, S3, Google Drive and Sharepoint, with Google Drive selected

  6. Choose your Integration, and optionally a File path.

    The path is a folder inside the drive you already connected, written with forward slashes — Reports/2026. Leave it empty to use the folder set on the connection itself.

    The File path field in the Report Delivery block, set to Reports slash 2026

    Important: the folders have to exist in the drive already. Astrato writes into a path, it doesn’t create one.

    The finished action, with the trigger set to a button on click and Report Delivery sending a PDF report to a Google Drive integration

Result: the sheet now has a button that delivers the report to the drive when someone clicks it.

A workbook sheet with a button above a bar chart

If the file doesn’t arrive

Check the run history first. A run marked Success means Astrato sent the file, so the problem is on the Google side rather than in your schedule or action.

Four things worth checking yourself:

  • The folders in your path don’t exist. Astrato writes a file into a folder, it doesn’t create the folder. If your path says Reports/2026, both Reports and 2026 have to be sitting in the drive already. This is the most common one.

  • The path is written the wrong way. Use forward slashes and no leading slash — Reports/2026, not /Reports/2026 or Reports\2026.

  • Something inside the drive is locked down. Being a member of a shared drive doesn’t guarantee access to every folder in it — individual folders can be restricted. The account Astrato uses needs to be able to read and write the folder your path points at, not just the drive itself. If delivery works with the path empty but fails with a path set, this is why.

  • You picked the wrong connection. If there’s more than one Google Drive integration, the file may be sitting in a different drive than you expected.

Anything else is almost certainly in the connection itself, which you may not be able to change. Take the run history to whoever set it up and point them at the troubleshooting in Connect Astrato to Google Drive.

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