Ironside Tech Tip: Writing a Printable Report

July 9, 2013/by Ironside Group

Difficulty: Easy

Required Ingredients: Report Studio, List Object, PDF Viewer

Scenario:

A report that you expected to be viewed exclusively in HTML will need to be printed. In order to do this, you switch the output to PDF to create a printable report and find that the columns span across multiple pages, making the report more difficult to understand.

You’ll need to make some minor modifications in order for the printable report to remain effective.

In the steps below, we begin by defining the PDF page orientation and size to resolve this problem and then take additional measures to further optimize the output.

Step 1: Launch Report Studio, select the GO Sales (query) package with a list report template when prompted. Then drag in the data items shown in the screenshots. Running the report in PDF should look similar to the screenshots above.

Step 2: Close the viewer and click the File dropdown, then click PDF Page Setup.

Step 3: Switch the Orientation from Portrait to Landscape and click OK.

The PDF output will now look similar to what is shown below. Although the landscape view can hold more columns, the columns in this particular report still spill over to the next page.

Step 4: In order to resolve this, select the (entire) list, then scroll down to the General section in the Properties pane and double-click Pagination. Then deselect Allow horizontal pagination and click OK.

Step 5: Run the printable report in PDF. Notice how all the columns remain perfectly readable.

Note: The Paper Size setting in the PDF Page Setup is often used to eliminate orphan columns by selecting a larger than standard size and then making use of the Fit to Page feature most printer clients offer. Although this works, it has a tendency to shrink content to a much greater degree.

Step 7 (optional): If the primary delivery method for the report will be in print, consider changing the default run option from HTML to PDF through Cognos Connection.