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Analysis Workspace - PDF Pagination

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Level 7

4/24/16

Firstly, love the improcements to Analysis Workspace and the overall menu changes throughout the Marketing Cloud, what a difference it's making to our teams already.

Are there any plans to improve the PDF output from Analysis Workspace either by splitting up the document up in to Pages or allowing users to define pages within a project?

34 Comments

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Employee

4/25/16

This is a tough one. The easy answer is to add an option to paginate. In reality, there are a bunch of UX challenges we would need to solve in order to this, though. What happens when you try to paginate a project that doesn't easily break into pages (misaligned bottom borders of tables and graphs, for example)? I'm not saying that we won't do it, simply that it's more complex than it may seem. We definitely will not force people to paginate, which means we need to figure out how it works as an option. 

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Level 2

6/16/16

I second this suggestion strongly.  I would love to set up all my scheduled reports in Workspace since it offers such great features, but when a recipient tries to print the PDF, it comes out as all of the reports on one page and is not usable.

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Level 1

9/21/16

I have to agree and second austinforever.  I just ran into this issue yesterday trying to print a workspace for a colleague.  The workspace had 3 panels including a segment comparison so it should print around ~3-5 pages.   Being all one single image... I could not get it to print in a readable fashion.  Definitely makes the printing capability null and void for most workspaces.

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Level 1

11/15/16

This *really* needs to be fixed. It isn't hard at all to render a PDF with page breaks in the appropriate places, or with spliced tables when they're longer than a single page (e.g. a 100-line table.) Currently the only way to send printable reports is to limit the size of the workspace panels to around 1 page of content, and then just create as many as necessary to convey the requested info, and have the recipients receive multiple separate emails with these reports split up. There is a print option in PDF Reader to print only the content that is visible on your screen, and go manually one page at a time, which is the only other way to do it, but CEOs and other report recipients won't do that.

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Employee

11/15/16

With all due respect, @jaydge88, things that seem easy from the outside often are not as simple as they appear. The biggest challenge with this request is that we do not force your project layout to respect traditional page boundaries. We have heard from many users that you do not want visualizations to break between pages (e.g., top of a bar graph on one page, bottom of the same bar graph on the next page), which means we would need to enforce page breaks—something that we don't do today. It's not the most impossible challenge, but it's not as simple as "just add a setting." We need to study it from a UX perspective, and my guess is that you would have to set a project as printable or non-printable, and if you select the former you will of necessity give up some of the layout flexibility that makes Analysis Workspace so great. Just something to keep in mind. We're definitely considering the request. 

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Level 1

11/15/16

@benjamingaines, first off, thank you very much for promptly replying on this. I'm sure you know how much it means to customers when they know they are heard by the company they love and when the company says it is definitely considering their requests - this is rare indeed and I REALLY appreciate it. 

I realize I made it sound simpler than it actually is to do multi-page, and even though I have experience with this from a UI architect position using XSL-FO and the like, I understand the considerations you posted.

Having a "printable" setting as you suggested would be totally acceptable I think; and in such a setting, it would be fine to have containers that indicate the contents of each page in the report (or markers denoting page breaks in between workspace panels.) Then I assume the content in each page container would auto-size to fit within that page just as it does today for the entire workspace project. The difference is, you'd be able to add more page containers/page breaks in order to get your reports onto multiple pages. Again, thanks for considering this, and please post back here to let us know about the progress!

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Employee

11/16/16

Thanks, @jaydge88! We will definitely keep you posted, and I promise to kick up some new discussions on the best ways to make this possible. 

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Level 2

11/29/16

No one in my company is actually printing this, so I care nothing about how the pages break in the PDF. It's more about sending Workspace data to people on a schedule who do not have access. I have over 1100 users of SiteCat, but I also have another 1,000 who need data sent to them without having direct access. Please consider changing this in iterations. Definitely step one should be to make the full space available in the PDF. This would make the tool way more usable here. I get complaints about this daily and many people waste a lot of time trying to find a workaround. The workaround they usually end up on is taking screenshots, which is not only unproductive, but is also cannot be automated. No offense, but when I tell people that Adobe Analytics can't produce a full PDF of their workspace, I often get the response of "didn't Adobe invent the PDF". I have to respond to that and it's a little embarrassing for me. Help me please!!!!!