Print reports to a file

[MrZed]

John, it would be nice if the reports that currently only go to the printer could alternately be sent to a word document or a text file. There are times when I would like to e-mail one of those reports to someone and I can't do that right now.

Seems this would be helpful.

Dan

[Ken kruzan]

dan,

If you install the win2pdf program you can print to a pdf file. You can then attach that to an e-mail.

ken

[MrZed]

I was hoping to end up with a .DOC file that I could edit or color do massage at will.

Dan

[jmuehleisen]

Dan,

I know what you mean. Although most of the time sending my report to a pdf is what I want to do (man, I use this a lot!) and win2pdf (and other similar programs) make it easy, easy, easy, there are those times when I'd like to send it to a word file.

Anyway, I'm currently evaluating a product that is an add-in that (if I put out the bucks) will allow any report to go to a pdf, .doc, .xls, .html, .xml, just about any common data format.

Here's what it would add to the report toolbar:



Woaaah. I just checked the website for frx2any: http://www.neova.ca/english/Frame_en.htm and noticed that they are running a special - $99 and I can put it into the app. Hmmm. I guess I don't need to pray too long about that one.

I guess I'd better test it again. This might be a good solution. It won't make it into this next release, but maybe the next one! I did notice that it slowed some reports down (because it uses Word automation to talk to Word), but that might be worth the tradeoff for the versatility.

I'll keep you posted on this one.[/img]

[jmuehleisen]

Dan,

Bad news. I fooled around a bit this afternoon with the frx2any tool I mentioned above. While the concept is great, this tool just didn't handle some of the DM reports properly.

Here is a sample report that it produced from the new 3 column partner list. You can easily see lots of problems with the formatting.



I'll keep looking for a solution as I think this will be a great asset to the program. At this point, however, it looks like this solution won't work for us.

[Marat Chariev]

John
Could you provide me sample of the report you tried to convert.
I will try to run it with the latest FRX2Any version (09.01.00) and see if the problem still be there.

Thanks
Marat Chariev
www.frx2any.com

[jmuehleisen]

Marat Chariev, the author of the frx2any report tool, graciously offered to take a look at the DM reports that were causing problems with frx2any, and was able to get them formatting properly.

The Fox community is truly a great one.

So, we may be back in business here. I'll be re-evaluating this tool as a possible addition to the DM. If it works out, be looking for this to appear in a future update!

It will give users the ability to save any report as a pdf, html, Word doc, Excel, RTF, graphic, or XML file.

I'm hopeful.

[elke]

Hi John,

I don't know where this stands right now, but I would be very interested in this feature too, mainly because the reports normally cause error messages from the printers. They are set up for printing on Letter size, whereas most of Europe uses exclusively A4. So it would be helpful for us here if we could manipulate the size manually.

Elke

[jmuehleisen]

Elke,

You mentioned getting errors on your reports. This has me curious.

I live in Africa, and all I use with the Donor Manager is A4 size paper. There are a few reports that are really tight on A4, but I don't think I ever recall getting an error as such.

Tell me more about what is happening here so I can see if I can figure it out.

(Note: I do recall that the Avery Label sheets are american sized rather than A4, but that's the only one I can think of that is specifically set as A4).

Let me know on this.