Ok, I’m probably certain most people export Phocas reports to Excel.
However on the odd occasion that a fixed PDF report is required (maybe for auditors etc) the formating is fairly basic.
How do I make my colums/rows fit to a single page and are there (or could there be), Headers, Titles, Date Created tag etc?
Instead of choosing Export, you can choose the “Print” icon (just above export). The data will then display on the page, then right click, choose Print, then at the Destination of the Print dialogue, choose “Save to PDF” in Chrome or “Microsoft Print To PDF” in any other browser.
Hi @StuartH & @anon90441911,
I am hot on @StuartH heels with subscriptions and exporting, so would like to know, if on a PDF subscription basis does the PDF option work or does it have the same formatting issues?
Thanks,
Jon
Thanks for your suggestions. Thanks also @anon90441911 for your print-to-PDF idea. Improvements to PDF exports are not on our immediate roadmap but have been logged in our system for potential future consideration.
@StuartH you are correct -the vast majority of subscriptions and exports from Phocas are not in PDF format. There are also some great features in financial statement exports like expand/contract and formulas for totals which wouldn’t work in a PDF, but work really well in Excel.
@JonKemp the PDF subscription is the same as a PDF export.
I think following yesterday, I’ve made a bit of a break through here.
I’ve discovered Nested Tables and feel that this could answer part of the issue.
What I find is that while you need to be careful how many charts you have in a line and how big they are (plus that they’re not to busy to not scale well) - they do seem to manage themselves quite well in the PDF / Print option.
However, the crux of what doesn’t work is the grid widgets - they’re unruly, don’t scale and often cut off data in both directions or risk spilling onto multiple pages.
In my quest to build a single page report for the non-tech types, I think a small tweak on Nested Tables might be the key.
I’ve added a nested table using only one layer to replicate the grid widget and dropped it into a dashboard. Hey presto the report renders well on A4 / A3 and there seems to be better scaling. You obviously lose the benefits of the drilling of data etc but maybe this could be added in time to enable the nested tables to be “filtered” but not be the source of the filter (if you get what I mean!)
I was going to say there is a tweak needed but I’ve now discovered I hadn’t set the line display format and now it does what I want after setting to Equal Width.
This is a fairly basic version using the Phocas test data from yesterday:
Ah, almost there - now have a single page report - only bit missing (excluding the filters mentioned before) is:
Need to be able to pick which line I want my Nested Table to be added to - currently not an option as it’s automatically added to a new line with now width setting
The Header information is shown in the print Preview - e.g. Username, Dashboard Name, Date / Time but it doesn’t actually print when it’s printed as it’s overridden by the browser settings.
Print Preview shows:
but actually comes out as:
Genius! I am going to steal this idea. Great thinking!
Jon
Thanks Jon. Its still not perfect but much closer to what I was trying to achieve. It does at least sort the width issue most of the time, you just have to really think about size and position along with content.
Page breaks on the other hand! 
. Not so much!
Its currently a one page snap report kind of thing.
