How Do I Export/Print a Report?
Another entry in our 'Basics' series, this article will cover all your options for exporting a report in Report Toaster.
For instance, say I wanted to save a copy of this report to my desktop?
Or get a version of the data to excel so I can add formulas, graphs and so on?
Or send somebody a clean PDF version of the data for visual presentation?
We'll start with the Order Line Items report like so:
Exporting the Data
Once I'm happy with the way the report looks (see these articles for adjusting the date, columns, filters, sorting etc) I'm ready to download a copy of this report to my device.
Go to the report, click the Export/Save As button top right, and choose either PDF, CSV, or JSON.
Clicking on any of these will automatically download this report in the chosen format to your device. Each of these options is explained below.
CSV
This is your standard .csv format used by programs like Microsoft Excel to get a spreadsheet of your data.
This can be a very useful format if you want to use the advanced MS Excel functionality to further adjust the data, such as creating charts, formulas, averages, totals, and so on.
Downloading the data to CSV is also great if you need to copy it to other applications (e.g. Google Sheets).
This format is used for programs like Adobe Reader/Acrobat and anything that uses files with the .pdf extension.
This can be a good one to choose for smaller data sets or if you want a more professional-looking document, like an invoice.
However, if you want to be able to work with larger data sets or be able to make changes to the report, we suggest using the CSV export option above.
For example, exporting the last 30 days worth of Order Line Items generated a 745 page pdf (!)
However, doing a PDF export of a Summary report (e.g. Sales by Product Type) produced a single-page PDF, as you can see above.
JSON
JSON is a standard text-based format for representing structured data based on JavaScript object syntax.
It's quite useful if you need the data in a more programmatic format for use in other applications.
This file can be opened by most browsers (e.g. here we see an export of the Order Line Items for our demo store in Firefox):
For most ordinary users of Report Toaster, this isn't a file format they will typically use - but it can be helpful if you need to get at the raw underlying data that's involved.
One such example of this is for users who want to separate out the different pieces of information contained in the Line Item Properties object by converting a JSON file to a CSV. See here for more information.
And that's it!
For other articles in our Basic Guides series, check out our main section here.