Dashboard - Page Break Line/Preview in Edit Mode

I, like a lot of people by the sounds of it use Dashboards as more of a way compile my data and display it in a visually pleasing way. As a result, my Dashboards sometimes are more than 1 page long. It would be great to know where the Page Break is i.e. a clear line visible when in Edit mode The current way I am working around this is very cumbersome - I move my widgets around to where I think the page overlaps and then check in File>Print to view the Preview and see that the widget is in the correct place and not across 2 pages. This has to be repeated several times to get it right.

The Page Break Line would display in Edit Dashboard view based on the Layout and Paper Size set in the current File>Print menu. You could also add a checkbox option in the same menu to turn this feature on or off the same as you currently have for Headers and Footers.

If you have any questions or require further info / examples please let me know.

Cheers,

Mark

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Mark Dowling

Mark Dowling

maei_13

Can we have an added feature wherein we could set a page break when printing the dashboard to pdf to keep off some parts of the dashboards such as shortcut widgets (links to another page). Also, please have an option to set default print setting according to user's preference or auto fit so it does not have to be manually selected every time. It takes time to do trial and error when printing the dashboard as it always need manual adjustments.

Samuel Mueller

I would like to see Page break views in everything in Smartsheet, sheets, reports, dashboards. Printing is a huge barrier and frustration in Smartsheet, please look into this.

Karen Bruer

I concur.

Amanda W _ MSE

I also would love to see this implemented as very frustrating indeed and have raised on a few occasions now to Smartsheet via the feedback form. It would save so much time when saving to PDF and printing.

Makiko Joans

I would like to have the feature to have the printing view. All the components in the dashboard will is available to fit to a printable page size and we rearrange or resize the widget. In addition to that, for the report widget, you have option to show all the data (rows). So, the reporting widget may take 2-3 pages without scrolling, but that's okay. It is useful to take some snapshot of that time as record.

Amanda W _ MSE

It would be great to have page breakers for when printing dashboards. Currently we have a number of project dashboards which pull into one overall dashboard and is then converted into a PDF for board papers.

This means on print preview the PDF is cut off halfway through an individual dashboard, tables and graphs. Currently to get the PDF into a format you have to go back and forth placing in spacing between widgets until you get the right format/information onto a page.

By having page breakers, this will help save hours of work guessing how many spaces to put between widgets so as they are not cut off half way through.

Galexa0711

I agree, having a page break option on the dashboard would be great!!

Tim Starkey

Huge fan of this idea. Dashboards are great, but reality is we often have to print the information to send to others. Page breaks would help a lot to keep the information looking clean and formatted.

May need to be posted as a separate idea, but another addition to this... if a dashboard has a report displayed, and the report is longer than the window in the dashboard, having the ability to print the entire report length would be great as well.

Barak Schriger

Question for folks on this thread - how important are pages? Are you physically printing your dashboards?

Tim Starkey

Yes, we do on occasion... we would likely print them much more often, but the formatting is a drawback.

In our case, we send weekly project updates. Those get circulated to other team members via email, are brought to meetings, redlined and sent back, etc.. Prior to Smartsheet, this was a manual word document with some info pulled in from our submittal tracker (excel) and our task list (MS Project or excel or whatever)

Now, we have a client dashboard set up for our projects that automate most of this. Submittal tracker and work plan (tasks) are in Smartsheet, along with a RAID log. But it's not well used because:

as much as we like Smartsheet, its hard to get a client to visit a page for an update... they much prefer it handed directly to them in email.
The dashboard lacks the density of information and rich text formatting (when the info is coming from cells in sheets) achieved through MS Word, and the formatting (page breaks) is a drawback. (Hopefully the new dashboard enhancements will help with the density of information.)
Since no one likes the way it presents when printed, managers are still manually doing the project updates.

lgearhart

I share the requirement as well, I am printing off a .pdf file of the several portfolio dashboards after review with management to have a snapshot in time file. Maybe there is a way to snapshot a dashboard someone knows, but this is what I do today, and the printing format is limited.

As well it would be nice if the actual dashboard width could be expanded, or maybe I miss that feature as well.

mtp105

We are saving as PDF every week so we can compare progress to the previous week's dashboard, since the online version updates every time you open it. I have an extra blank PDF page at the bottom of every PDF since you can't adjust the dashboard page size. These PDFs may also go to Sr Mgmt. It looks sloppy. I agree it would also be great to be able to adjust the PDF version to show all lines of a report rather than just the visible part that shows on the interactive online version with scroll bars. I do not want to expand out every report since that would make it difficult to navigate while showing in a meeting or for users to see what's going on by using the most current online version. It would be nice if there was a way to show snapshots of the dashboard or reports as of a certain date as well as the most current version, so you can see how things are changing more easily than having to print to pdf.

Adrian Mandile CHESS

When printing to PDF a dashboard that has a report widget that flows over a page break, it will cut through the middle of a row instead of completely before or after an entire row's height.

This often cuts text in two making it difficult to read (refer to Row 2.16 in the image below). This also happens with charts/graphics.

Can we please have a Print to PDF with page breaking that respects all complete widget heights and keeps them whole, and also respects complete individual rows within a report widget?

PS: this is NOT a browser issue.

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