Export inventory reports as PDF's in version 9

[mvest20]

I have what I hope is a very dumb question.

We recently upgraded to version 9 of the Casper Suite, and I am unable to export my inventory results as a PDF. In version 8, at the bottom of an inventory search screen there was an option to view results as a PDF. In version 9, there is an export function, but I only have the options to export to CSV or tabbed files. Am I missing something obvious, or was this feature removed from the new version of the suite?

Thanks in advance,

-Matt

[mm2270 · Accepted solution]

Its not in version 9 anymore, at least as far as I can tell. There may be a note on it somewhere in the admin guide for 9. but I don't know as I haven't looked through all of it.

But, there are some options available to you. You may not like them, at least compared to the way it was under version 8.x, but you can do one of these 2 things-

• Export to csv, then open in Excel and print your Excel file to PDF

• While you have your search results up on screen, change the Show menu to "All", then choose Print and on the Print menu choose to save as a PDF.
The nice thing here is that Casper Suite 9 does a great job of removing all the extraneous UI stuff when printing what you see on screen and only giving you the content. Check it out and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised with that.

While neither of these are as pretty or convenient as the old PDF reports, they can at least get you a PDF of the search results, and maybe that's good enough?

Edit: regarding the second option, forgot to mention that you may need to change the scale in the print dialog to get all your shown columns to be on a single page width, depending on how many columns you have showing.

[mvest20]

Thanks for the response.

That is terribly disappointing that that feature was removed. I did look through the admin guide and from what I could find, it only has the options to export that are already mentioned here. Your workarounds are appreciated, and I will definitely try printing the page as a PDF, but it was so easy to generate a nice looking PDF in version 8 I'm disappointed that is no longer the case.

Hopefully JAMF can get that feature back in the next release?

[mm2270]

I agree that it is a bit disappointing.
As I look more and more at version 9, and as we discover some of the items that didn't make the cut, my guess is that in the quest to get version 9 out the door there were some compromises made. Perhaps JAMF solicited some feedback on the usefulness of the PDF report feature and the response they got wasn't enough to warrant engineering it into the product. Given that version 9 was a pretty major rewrite they would have needed to figure out exactly how to get it working under version 9 and maybe there wasn't enough time or justification to do that.

As for making it into a future version? Perhaps, but I'd suggest putting up a Feature Request if you really want it back. Just wishing for it won't make it return.