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<< Click to Display Table of Contents >> Navigation: USING REPORTS > Saving Reports as PDF Files |
Some users may wish to save reports to PDF files. ACCOUNTS allows you to do that, so that those documents can be emailed to others in your organization as attachments.
The Save PDF Options
To do this for reports click the Save PDF button on the window. This will bring up a "Save PDF File As" dialog, in which you can both select a directory and specify a filename to save the PDF file as. Once you do that and click Save, it will take a moment to save the PDF, then display that PDF file for you in your standard PDF viewing application (usually the Adobe Reader).
Reports can also be saved to PDF with the Save As button, which gives you some additional options like emailing the PDF version of the report to someone after it is created.
Unlike some earlier versions of ACCOUNTS, and the current version of Software4Nonprofits DONATION, the program does not contain the PDF printer "novaPDF Pro v7 for DONATION". All PDF printing is done by code internal to the program.
The OnDemand version also has a printer called "Preview PDF (from COMPUTERNAME)", where COMPUTERNAME is replaced by the name of your local computer. We do not recommend using that, for reasons explained here.
Appending Multiple PDFs Together
When you use Save PDF or an equivalent option and the file you select to save to already exists, you are given three options: Replace Existing File, Append to Existing File, or Cancel Save.
If you pick Replace Existing File, the previous file with that name will be deleted, and your save will then just include the current report.
If you pick Append to Existing File, the contents of your current report will be added as new page(s) at the end of whatever is currently in that PDF file. That gives you a way to get multiple reports into one PDF file.
Possible Problems in Some Reports
There are some reports that can need multiple pages across to hold all of the columns, including Custom Reports, Income Statement by Months, Income Statement by Quarters, Fund Income Statement by Months, Fund Income Statement by Quarters, and Monthly Budgets.
Those reports may not work correctly when you use the Save PDF button. What you will observe, if there is a problem, is that a tiny bit of the left edge of the 2nd page will appear at the right edge of the 1st page, and that bit will be missing from the 2nd page. If the report requires more pages across, the same problem will continue on them.
Unfortunately this is due to a limitation in the PDF printing capabilities of the program we use to create ACCOUNTS (PowerBuilder) and we cannot directly do anything about it.
If that happens, a solution would be to use the Print button with that report instead, and select an external PDF printer, for instance Microsoft Print to PDF, which is always included in Windows 10. If you have the novaPDF printer installed (which comes with the Software4Nonprofits DONATION program, and also came with earlier versions of ACCOUNTS) you can try that, but in our experience on at least some of these reports it did not work correctly at all.