Report not printing as shown on screen

SSFeatures

Hey @Mark4555666, I'm a solo developer (Nathan Braun) and I'm trying to address many of these requests that Smartsheet has been ignoring.

I'm building this tool (SSFeatures) and I'm constantly adding new features to make it better. I'm also trying to keep the tool as inexpensive as possible, just enough to cover my development costs.

The tool has a PDF generator that prints the report correctly.

HB_admin

@Janelle Amazing. I stumbled upon this thread while trying to figure out how to print a report that looks like what it shows on the screen. I CANNOT believe how old this thread and how nothing has been done about it. This would be really useful tonight but now I have to spend more time outside of work hours to try and sort out a solution.

Janelle

I spend more time downloading the data into Excel so I can create somewhat of a report so I can send my info out. Very frustrating.

Janelle

Can we get an explexplanation on why this request has been put on the back burner? SSFeatures has been able to code it, why can't Smartsheet? Yes, I could purchase the SSFeatures, but I pay enough to Smartsheet to where I don't feel like I should have to pay another party for the capability to print a report.

SSFeatures

Hey Janelle, Nathan Braun here.

Just for some technical background about why this is difficult for the Smartsheet dev team.

When you generate PDFs using the Smartsheet generator, they send the request to the server and then the server generates the PDF and sends the data back to your browser.

This means that the server must recreate the entire report's layout, including groupings and summaries, all of the formatting, all of the cells, etc. It requires adding a bunch of code to the server, to replicate what the browser is already doing.

The reason Smartsheet chose to implement it this way is that it keeps the Smartsheet app smaller (faster load times) and it makes generating PDFs faster since the server has more resources than the browser.

The downside is that they essentially have to implement everything twice. Once for the browser, and once in the server to handle the PDF generation. If they add a new feature to the browser, such as grouped/summarized reports, they also have to duplicate the work on the server, which they still haven't done in this case.

For SSFeatures, I implemented the PDF generator directly in the browser. So I'm grabbing all of the data straight from the Smartsheet application and putting it into the PDF generator. This is great because the app already has all of the formatting, grouped data, summary data, cell data, etc. So it's easy for me to expand whenever Smartsheet adds new features. Though, my PDF generator was very difficult to build, but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

The downside with my approach is that it's slower for me to generate the PDFs in the browser, than it is for the Smartsheet team to generate the PDFs on the server. For example, if you try to generate a large PDF with SSFeatures, you may notice it lag a bit, whereas for Smartsheet it would be almost instant.

Even though PDF generators look simple, they are surprisingly complicated. But that's not really a good excuse for the Smartsheet dev team, considering how many engineers they have.

I hope this helps explain some of the technical hurdles!

Janelle

Nathan,

Thanks for the information. It is nice to know the issues that are being dealt with. Like you said, it still not a good excuse. What is really frustrating is the communication from Smartsheet about this issue. After all the times I have requested information on this, I received only one comment from Smartsheet and that was basically "Coming Soon". They need to start answering the questions that are put out there with a true statement about the issue that is being brought up. If they don't have it on their list to add, say so. If they don't want to add it to their list, say so.

Janelle

SSFeatures

Yea I completely agree with you on that!

When I quit my full time job to start SSFeatures (~11 months) ago, I was super worried about working on any features that Smartsheet put on the "roadmap". Then I realized that the "roadmap" really didn't mean anything. It seemed like they just put stuff on the roadmap to appease the situation, without actually giving a time estimate or updates.

Now I implement whatever lol, as long as people say that it's useful. I don't really pay much attention to whether or not Smartsheet says that they're planning to build it.

I recently changed my website to highlight the fact that Smartsheet doesn't communicate well, and they ignore this community forum. Hopefully this changes in the future!

I don't want to waste my time building things that the Smartsheet team is actively working on.