How do I print an Advantos report to Microsoft Excel?

Setup -- You need to have a printer defined on your PC that is a "print to file" printer. I call mine FILE but you can call it whatever you want -- the selected Port should be "FILE".

You will need to add that printer to your Advantos User Profile - so that it is available for you to use as a printer.

Step 1 -- Print your report and select the FILE printer (uncheck the PDF box). This will create a ".txt" file of the report.

Step 2 -- Open the .txt file in Excel.

Step 3 -- Highlight column A and select menu option DATA --> TEXT TO COLUMNS

Step 4 -- In the Wizard select Fixed Width and then adjust the column breaks to match the data. They will be close - but the header lines confuse the wizard and some breaks will usually be off.

Step 5 -- Save it in Excel. I have attached a copy of this for you. There is some formatting cleanup necessary here -- the first 2 rows and the last row need to be deleted. There are header rows and footers interspersed in the document. And - of course - the headers are parsed with the columns.

Most of this formatting cleanup is required in every method of "print to excel" that we have used in every software product. A .csv output file allows you to bypass the "text to columns" step - but this is quick once you have done it a couple of times. This entire process takes a couple of minutes and is very workable; many of our clients are using this for one report or another.

I'm having problems with printing to ".pdf"s. My client responds with runtime errors and reports
      cycling through forms until I'm bumped out of Advantos.

This is often an issue with Adobe and the web browser. A ".pdf" report is routed through the user's web browser and it is assumed that the user has Adobe's Acrobat product installed on their client machine. Often, users have the Acrobat plug-in installed so when the browser links to a ".pdf" Acrobat opens inside the web browser.

The solution to this problem is to force the Adobe Reader to open in its own window, rather than in the browser itself. This, of course, requires the Adobe Acrobat Reader to be installed on the client machine.

To do this, open Adobe Acrobat Reader, click on the "Edit" menu then click on "Preferences", select the "Internet" category then uncheck the "Display PDF in browser" checkbox.

Sometimes the Internet Explorer / Adobe Reader plug-in has issues, but...it usually will work properly as a separate application, outside the browser.

The ".pdf" checks I'm printing aren't printing the MICR line in the correct size. They're a little small.

This is often an issue with Adobe and a form that is pre-sized to print close to the edges of the paper.

The solution to this problem is to modify the print function's "Page Sizing and Handling" section to output the "Actual Size" of the document.

To do this, when Adobe Acrobat Reader opens, select to print the document then in the "Print" dialog box, click on the "Actual Size" option in the Page Sizing and Handling section.