Managing Legal Sized Reports/Exporting Reports to Excel/Storing Reports
A number of reports in RFMS were configured originally to print to Legal sized paper, a paper size unique to the US. Legal size is a little larger than A4, so printing a report configured for Legal to A4 results in loss of columns.
Requests have been made to adjust the reports so that they print to A4, but there are only a couple of ways to accommodate A4; one is to remove some data columns from the report, in which case the challenge arises as to what should be removed without creating issues for users? The other option is to wrap lines on the report so that the data for a single record appears across two lines. For most users this would not be a welcome change.
Currently the answer is to first save the report to PDF, but we are introducing an enhancement that will give users another option when working with reports that print to legal-sized paper. Beyond that, users are recognising that there are better ways to handle reports out of RFMS, irrespective of paper size:
In the upcoming v.19 release, users will have the option to print legal-size reports to A3. A full page report printed to A3 will result in some space on the right hand of the report, but users might welcome this as space for notes.
Legal-size reports can be printed initially to PDF, and then printed to A4 if required. In fact, we are seeing more and more clients saving reports to PDF instead of printing them to paper. Reports will still need to be printed, but very often a report is run to create a record that is only rarely looked at. Such reports saved to PDF are stored electronically, so are not subject to damage or loss, and they don’t require the time, effort, and space to be filed physically. Saving reports to PDF, and printing only those that you need, is good business practice.
Legal reports can be exported to CSV for opening in Excel. If the report is to be printed, exporting to CSV has the advantage of being able to delete or otherwise manipulate the data in the report so that it is more relevant and useful when printed from Excel. Again, all reports can be exported to CSV; this is a feature of RFMS that is often overlooked.
Tablets are becoming more common in our businesses. Reports shared as PDFs can be viewed and annotated and shared between tablet users.
If you have set the goal to have a paperless office, you are not alone and we will be happy to answer any questions you might have along the way.