Printing Dashboard to pdf not the same for all users

Ev Morris

Hi All,

I have created a dashboard that needs to be printed by different people.

When I print to pdf it looks perfect, but it is different for other people.

E.g. One person is missing all text in one Rich Text widget, and the widgets are misaligned on each page for another user.

Background graphics and Headers&Footers are turned on for everyone.

Would you know why this is happening please?

Thanks...

Brett Wyrick

Hey Evelyn -

I've been unfortunately finding that I'm running into the same thing at my organization.

Smartsheet's new Dashboard editor seems to move the dashboard "blocks" around dynamically (similar to a mobile web page) which is not always a good thing for people like us that "print" the Dashboards to PDF for static reports. I utilize mine as a weekly Status Report with charts and graphs.

For me, there's times that the Dashboard will "Print" to PDF while being too far to the left. Charts like the half-moon will load too largely. Text is... weird sometimes. This especially happens if I don't allow the Dashboard to completely load - there are animations that are triggered at the beginning of viewing a dashboard, and pressing Print too early makes those animations do all sorts of funky things.

Here's what's worked for me:

• Zoom out to 67%. This makes the dashboard skip around a bit, but seems like it helps (it shouldn't, but seems like it does)
• Allow the Dashboard to fully load and stop any movement (i.e. the animations of charts), and make sure it looks like it's aligned as it ought to be.
• Then Print to PDF.

If it looks off on the Print Preview, I close the print dialog screen, refresh the browser, and then try again. Refreshing seems like it works fairly consistently.

This particularly seems to be occurring when I edit the Dashboard first (i.e., go in and update one portion of the dashboard). Sorry I don't have a "this is why this is happening" explanation for you - it just seems like the new dashboard is still buggy. The old dashboard had its quirks and pains but never did this.

¯\(ツ)/¯

Ev Morris

Hi Brett,

Thanks for your response. Good to know it's not just me!

We don't even update any elements of the dashboard before printing. We only update related metric/report data that updates automatically and doesn't impact the size of the widget, and no animations.

It's actually a great feature and saves so much time but the printing issues are just annoying.

Thanks again for your response!

Brett Wyrick

You're welcome, Evelyn. Hopefully someone at Smartsheet is reading these and taking notes - the Dashboard printer is broken and inconsistent!