Once in a while, I’ll run a scheduled report and for whatever reason, the report won’t return any data. It ran just fine — no errors, no failures — but there’s just no data in the body. The reports are saved into various folders on the network. In thumbing through these folders, I can spot the reports that ran with no data quickly. It’s the ones that have a certain file size.
In my case, the report in question renders at 67 KB if it’s empty. Dashboards with graphs, sparklines, and other fixed-size objects will show a little variance in size if a section is empty. Table rows, on the other hand, will have a much greater impact on the file size when they are populated. The exaggerated file size difference then makes spotting the blank ones much easier.
So, next time you open a report and you find the content to be empty, take note of the file size. That number will raise a red flag for you whenever you see it and hopefully help you to catch (and correct) it before your users do.