Has anyone ever taken an excel form, save it to HMTL, populate it with values/fields/ampervariables via the !IBI.AMP.FIELDNAME and then print it to pdf successfully WITHOUT page overflowing?

I have a very busy excel sheet, 8 financial reports, that need to be populated with data, displayed online in html format so that they can do a mouse over on it and then print it out in pdf.

The problems I have encountered thus far are

1. When saving from Excel to HTML, then printing, the entire html page became enlarged and no longere fits on one page as it did in Excel. It overflows to the right and down below. This is the closest solution though without having to retype the form. It is the least amount of work. This is outside of WebFOCUS. The pdf software we use here is pdf995
2. If I create the form in precision report, I do not have the html online or the mouse over capability. This is very tedious and I prefer not to do this as the form will change every year and adding/deleting a 'row' would be a nightmare since every cell has borders on and everything is separate and would have to be moved separately.
3. Use 8.0 sandbox and create the report with the new features for pdf, mostly all in heading(borders and merging cells) and then create it in HTML and try to get all my borders working there too. Then it would not be so hard to add or delete a line from year to year.

Any other suggestions or other ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

I am in 7.6.9 ++ with plans to go to 8 in January, 2011.

The easiest method would be to consider them as separate, e.g. have the HTML form supply the variables to an underlying fex which outputs to PDF report rather than try and have the user print the HTML page. I know that can be a trifle tedious and with large data trawling it can be expensive in terms of I/O but at least you'd have the ability for the users to have HTML interaction plus a well formed, controlled, output via PDF (you also wouldn't need PDF995 either).

T

Thanks Tony, I agree. These are financial forms. I will have to create them twice, once for the online html and then again for the pdf print. The borders do not work in my release for pdf. These forms are very labor intensive with output to the right of the fields and not below.

Kathy

We have a similar reporting, build with FML
and we have done this all in one report and there is no need to change someting form year to year.

the user can select either HTML, PDF or Excel and based upon that choise the report gives you drill down ofr no drill down options.

It is however a bit complex to explain how this works in allthe details, but the tric is that we have created a prereport that creats in fact all the lines for an other FML fex.
This report is saved as an FTM file and included in the second part of the basic report.

It also has all the format codes that you need to have.

I can send you all the coding but you need to know that is based upon our GL system and also has a lot of dutch comment between the coding.

Let me know if this might help you.

Hi Frank, interesting. Are you using borders on every cell and do you have all different size boxes all over the form?

It is a requirement that the form be kept for each year up to 12 years.