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Per the 1.5 years of queries being made, I believe there is suitable interest from the Community that Smartsheet provides the basic functionality of being able to print a Grouped Report. The system currently reverts the Report to a basic Sheet when Print is selected. This is not suitable or acceptable.
We've stopped developing our Smartsheet documents due to this restriction and now sit in a holding pattern waiting for an update. - See Printing Grouped Reports - Page 3 — Smartsheet Community.
I created a browser extension and implemented a new PDF generator to solve this problem. You can click here to download the browser extension.
Then click the "SSFeatures" button at the top, and then click "Generate PDF".
Here is an example of what the generated PDF looks like, notice how it has all of the grouped and summary rows:
I'm constantly improving this PDF generator and adding new features to the extension, so if you have any feedback, feel free to respond here, or email me at nathan@ssfeatures.com.
I hope some of you find this useful!
@Lindsay Whitbread - I am also a consultant. Thanks for the offer tho! There is also @SSFeatures that offers a print grouped report option if I needed that. But the work arounds I have implemented are sufficient. I was just expressing my displeasure with the fact that Smartsheet had not yet created the option for the formulas in the reports to be exported in this features update request.
@Genevieve P. - Please give us an update on this subject or provide us with a contact (manager) who CAN assist us with this rediculous unanswered basic issues.
Providing generic responses with 🚫 NO follow-up, is becoming a reoccuring theme of SS, making it easier for some of us to just 🏃♀️LEAVE the Software for something more functional/useful/$$. Its VERY sad that people have to develop add-ons for your product to address basic core features that other platforms are currently providing for FREE. 😤
Also waiting for a solution to this for years. For small reports I can sometimes screenshot what I need but that is a very primitive workaround.
I made a report and grouped values in the report. When sending it via email as an Excel spreadsheet, I get a raw Excel file with no grouping/filters applied.
Probably a quick fix for SS dev team.
Best regards,
Primoz
Just for some technical background about why this is kinda 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 SmartSheet app 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.
For SSFeatures, I implemented the PDF generator directly in the browser. So I'm just 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 very easy for me to expand the SSFeatures PDF generator whenever SmartSheet adds new features.
I was surprised when I realized that they generate the PDFs on the server.
I hope this helps explain some of the technical hurdles!
+1
I agree with the person who said this is a bug, not an enhancement. Kinda ridiculous…
Do you have a date yet for when this is expected to be fixed? With the change in access levels coming next year (i.e., charging us more) I am hoping you can now focus on prioritizing this fix instead of re-programming access levels to the system.
Any updates yet? Reporting is critical for us…
When will the PRINTING GROUPED REPORTS AS THEY APPEAR capability be released? (I have seen discussions as far back as 2020)
@frobison14816, @swww, @Bilbrey David
No updates as of yet.
At the moment SSFeatures is the only tool that can print grouped reports.
Hi @George T, this is currently possible if you use SSFeatures.
SSFeatures has a custom PDF generator that includes grouping and summary rows.
Best!
Adding my request for printing grouped formats for reports.
Hi @Richard Heath,
I'm posting this similar thread for a third time today because I have seen so many repeated requests over many years that have gone unresolved by Smartsheet. There is a browser extension app that I have come across called SSFEatures that can print Grouped Reports to PDF,
It can also do a bunch of other long-requested things such as: • Copy & Paste Automation Workflows, • Conditional Format cloning for multiple columns, • Copy & Paste Conditional Formatting, • Auto Sort Rows • Spell Checker, • Selective Hide/Unhide columns, etc.
Please add this feature. It is not the best use of our time to manually print one line at a time. Printing the whole thing to one report is not a workable solution as we need to send individual reports to different departments.
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