How to Unpublish a Smartsheet
Publishing a Smartsheet puts it on a URL that, depending on its security controls, can be opened with no Smartsheet login at all — handy for a client who should not need an account, and easy to forget about a year later. Here is how to check whether a sheet is published, how to take it down, and how to find the publications nobody remembers creating.
Check whether a sheet is published
Publishing is a Business and Enterprise feature — on a Pro plan there is no Publish control to find. Where it is available it is set per item, and the setting lives in the sheet itself:
- Open the sheet and click Publish in the right-hand feature bar. (Reports work the same way; only dashboards use File → Publish.)
- The panel lists each way the sheet can be published: Read Only - Full, the lighter-weight Read Only - HTML, Edit by Anyone — which lets whoever holds the link change your data as if they were an Editor — and iCal (Calendar) for feeding sheet dates into an outside calendar.
- Anything switched on shows its live URL. Who can open that URL is governed by your account’s Security Controls: published items are either available to anyone with the link, or restricted to users on the same Smartsheet plan, who have to sign in first.
- Paste the URL into a private browsing window to see exactly what somebody without a login sees.
Turn a publication off
In the same Publish panel, switch the publication off. The URL stops working immediately — for everyone holding it, including anyone who bookmarked it or a search engine that crawled it. Turning it back on restores access through the published link under its configured access controls, so leave it off unless the link is genuinely still needed.
Two things catch people out. Each publication type is separate, so switching off Read Only - Full can leave an Edit by Anyone link live. And a report built on the sheet has a publication of its own — reports can only be published read-only, but that page still shows your rows to whoever holds the link until you turn it off too.
The hard part is finding the ones you forgot
A published link outlives the reason for it. A sheet published for one client review, an iCal feed set up for a project that ended, an Edit by Anyone page created to collect answers quickly — none of them announce themselves afterwards, and nothing in your sheet list shows which items are live on a URL.
Smartsheet’s own answer is the Admin Center published-items report, which needs the System Admin role and arrives as an emailed spreadsheet. A sheet owner cannot run it for their own sheets, and by the time it lands it is already a static snapshot — so the person most likely to have published something is the one who cannot check.
Audit your published sheets and reports
Our Published Items audit answers the question directly: it checks the publish status of every sheet and report you own or administer — up to 1,000 items in a run — and lists each live published link in one table — read-only pages, Edit by Anyone pages and iCal feeds — with who can reach each one. Anything editable by anyone holding the URL sorts to the top, because that is the finding you want to read first. It is read-only: nothing is unpublished for you, but you leave with the exact list of items to go and switch off.
Do it in one pass instead
Find every Smartsheet and report of yours that is published to a public URL, see exactly who can reach each link, and catch the ones anyone can edit.
Try Published Items FreeFrequently asked questions
How do I know if a Smartsheet is published?
Open the sheet and click Publish in the right-hand feature bar (reports too; dashboards use File → Publish). Any publication that is switched on shows its live URL, and your Security Controls decide whether that URL is open to anyone or only to users on your plan. There is no indicator in the sheet list, so checking many sheets means opening each one — or running an audit that reads the publish status of all of them.
Does unpublishing a Smartsheet break the link for everyone?
Yes. Switching the publication off stops the URL working immediately for anyone holding it, including bookmarks and any copy of the link that has been forwarded on. The sheet itself and its data are untouched.
Can I see all my published Smartsheets in one place?
Not in Smartsheet unless you are a System Admin, who can request an emailed published-items report for the whole account. An audit tool checks the publish status of every sheet and report you own or administer and lists the live links together.