Conditionally Hide Report Columns

When designing a report, an added column can be shown or hidden. This can be done by clicking on the field's option arrow in the Columns list, then clicking Hide Field, or by going to the Column Formatting menu, selecting the field, and toggling the Show Field property.

It would be ideal if this property was expanded to allow conditional formatting, such as conditionally hiding or showing an entire column based on a custom formula, which could be parameter or access based. It wouldn't be able to have per record conditions, as it would have to be all or nothing. This would open up the possibility for having detailed and simplified reports without having to create duplicate reports (which is not an easy feat and then requires additional work to maintain), as certain fields are not useful to the general report user, but would be more informative to include for admins.

The main place I am interested in using this is for broadcast reports that I have no control over before they are sent out. We have linked columns on some of our reports. They are configured as "Link to URL" format with a local javascript URL. Within the connected application, the link opens to the associated record. When these reports are exported from Yellowfin in an Excel format, or are sent out through email from a broadcast, the links obviously are no longer functional, which can be confusing and appear malicious to the end-user.

I already have bookmarked report filters that are used for sending the broadcast, so it would be easy to add a parameter and adjust the bookmark such that "Show Linked Fields - No" or "Show Detailed Fields - No" is applied and the linked columns, or any more that I specify in the report design, are hidden before the report broadcast is generated and sent.

The available Conditional Formatting for columns only allows me to specify the font color and style of a field in a single record based on other values in that record. So short of putting the parameter value into the report grid, hiding that parameter value column, and conditionally changing values to "hide" by using white font with a white background, there isn't any way to completely hide the value or the entire column+header.

I used to create Crystal Reports for another application that I worked in, and this was a pretty standard and simple way to allow the end-user to customize their report output based on their parameter selections while also minimizing duplicative report maintenance for the designers.