Shared views

A shared view is a web page that shows your live Attio records to someone outside your workspace. You pick the source, you pick the columns, and you get a link. Whoever opens it sees current data — no Attio account, no login, and no way to change anything.

You’ll see them called portals in the app’s address bar. They’re the same thing.

• Send a client their own slice of your pipeline without giving them a CRM seat.
• Give an investor a live portfolio list instead of a spreadsheet that’s stale by the time it lands.
• Hand a contractor exactly four columns out of an object that has forty.
• Replace the monthly “here’s the latest export” email with one link that never goes out of date.

1. 01

   Open Portals and hit New shared view

   It uses the Attio connection you already have. If you haven’t connected Attio yet, you’ll be asked to first.

2. 02

   Pick what to share

   An object, a list, or a saved view. A saved view arrives with its Attio filters still applied, so it’s the easiest way to share a narrow slice.

3. 03

   Choose and order the columns

   Up to 50. Drag them into the order you want them read in. Anything you don’t pick is never sent to the visitor’s browser.

4. 04

   Set the sorting

   One attribute, ascending or descending. Attio does the sorting, so it applies across every record — not just the ones currently on screen.

5. 05

   Decide on a password and downloads

   Both optional. Downloads are on by default; a password is off by default.

6. 06

   Create the link and copy it

   Copy link is on the shared views list. Open lets you see exactly what your recipient will see.

A clean table with your title on it, a green Live from Attio badge, and a line in the footer saying exactly when the rows were read out of Attio — so nobody has to argue about whether a tab left open since Tuesday is current.

• They can resize a column, click a long cell to read all of it, and scroll for more rows.
• They can download a CSV, if you allowed it.
• They can’t sort, filter, or search — the order is your decision, not theirs.
• They can’t edit anything. There is no path from a shared view back into your Attio records.

The page also tells search engines not to index it, so a link pasted somewhere careless doesn’t turn up in Google.

The link itself is a long random address that nobody guesses or stumbles onto. A password is a second lock on top of it, and its real job is the forwarded link: when a recipient passes your link to someone you didn’t intend, changing the password cuts off everyone who has the old one without you having to reissue the link.

A revoked link, a deleted one, and one that was mistyped all show the same neutral “unavailable” card. A password-protected link shows nothing at all before the password is right — not the title, not the source, not your client’s name.

Edit lets you change the title, the columns and their order, the sorting, the password, and whether downloads are allowed. Changes reach anyone with the link open the next time they load the page.

The source is fixed once created. A different object or list means an entirely different set of columns, so that’s a new shared view rather than an edit to this one.

Rows are read from Attio when someone opens the page, and a fresh reading starts every five minutes. People opening the same link within the same few minutes share one reading of the data, which is what stops twenty recipients scrolling at once from burning through your Attio API limit.

So a page reloaded now is current. A tab that’s been open and scrolling for a while can be up to twenty minutes behind, which is why the footer prints the read time. If a recipient has had a page open a long time, the table will ask them to refresh rather than quietly mixing old rows with new ones.

Every limit below is shown on the page when it’s hit — a table that quietly stops at a round number is worse than one that says why.

If your source points at another object — a deal that references a company, say — the column picker also offers that company’s attributes, listed like “Company › Domain”. Pick one and the shared view fills in the value from the other side.

It’s how you show company details next to deals without your recipient ever seeing the companies object itself. It does mean more reading per page, so it’s the first thing to drop if a busy view warns that some linked values couldn’t be filled in.

When downloads are on, visitors get a Download CSV button holding exactly the columns on screen, in the same order. Turn it off and the button disappears — and the download stays blocked even for someone who saved the address.

• Empty cells show as a dash on screen but come out empty in the file, so they sort and sum properly.
• The file opens in Excel with accents and symbols intact.
• Anything that looks like a spreadsheet formula is written as plain text, so a value typed into Attio can’t run on your recipient’s machine.
• If the download hit a limit, the file name says -partial rather than leaving you to guess.