We are excited to announce the availability of Print and Export as PDF capabilities, as well as enhancements to Automations such as allowing triggers to be invoked by formulas. We’ve also published 14 new templates to start from in categories ranging from Real Estate to Construction, Education, HR, and IT. Let’s take a look …
Print
As with traditional spreadsheet software, Spreadsheet.com now includes the ability to print as a native feature. To access Print options, click the print icon from the top left corner of the toolbar when in a Sheet view.
The Print settings window offers a range of options to configure your print job. As you change the options in the panel on the right side of the dialog, the sheet preview at left will dynamically update.
NOTE: Currently only Sheet views can be printed. We are working on adding Print support for Gantt and Kanban views.
Export as PDF
In addition to exporting to Excel, you can now download worksheets as PDF documents. Select File > Download from the workbook menu, then select PDF (.pdf).
For more details see the updated Exporting article in our Help Center.
Automation Enhancements
Automations are now triggered when formulas and formula-dependent cells are updated. This was a non-trivial addition and we’re thrilled to roll it out, addressing a number of your requests. Before this update, automations where triggered only on manual cell updates.
EXAMPLE: Let cell A1 have the value 10 and cell B1 be the formula =A1+1. Whenever A1 changes, the formula in B1 automatically updates. Now, any automations configured to run when column B changes will be triggered for row 1.
In addition to formula support, Automations now include full support for sending Notifications to Users using Related row lookup columns. Previously, if a worksheet had a Related row column pointing to a User column in a different worksheet, you could not send notifications to users tagged in that column. This limitation has now been removed.
New Templates
We’ve been been busy creating new templates to start from. The following 14 new templates are now available in the Spreadsheet.com Template Gallery.
Hi Matt,
Thanks to the entire team for bringing these updates, the ability to export to PDF and excel sheets are much awaited.
Small note: while exporting into excel sheets or into PDF, the headers are not getting included. Having headers (which are generally part of columns) will add meaning to rows.
Another Request:
Once the PDF or Excell sheet is identified for export, can it be an email attachement and to be sent to one of the user or client email id stored in another workbook?
We added an option to enable this in the print settings dialog. About half way down you’ll see a section called Sheet setup options where you can select Table region only. This will show the table header at the top of all pages.
Thanks for this suggestion. This is something we will consider as we expand the capabilities of Automations.
So happy to see the new Print and Download as PDF options.
Here is my list of critical features for printing/pdf creation:
#1) Need to be able to have all the print settings saved for the worksheet, so that the next time I print it will be as simple as Ctrl+P. Example: Invoice template that is reused over and over. This printing feature is by far the most important to me because otherwise there is no way to have templates designed as forms with print settings that are already set up to print correctly.
#2) Need to be able to Scale to 1 Page (both width and height). So far, none of my spreadsheets I’ve tried so far fit on a single page, even when using Narrow margins and Scale to Width … and I think that is because I typically also use smaller top/bottom margins. But I also don’t want to use the View option because I don’t want to print the entire worksheet.
#3) Narrow margins only reduces the left/right margins, but I also need the top/bottom margins to be narrow (see #2).
#4) Need to be able to define a print area to avoid having to select the correct range every time before printing. For example, if you allow the user to define a named range as “Print_Area” then one of your Print settings could be “View, Selected Range, Print_Area” … this might also make it possible to have spreadsheet.com be more compatible with Excel when the Excel file has print areas defined.
#5) Need the custom cell borders to not get messed up when printing. So far, I haven’t found any pattern - borders are just missing or the wrong color seemingly at random, even after removing and then redefining. Also, the left edge border of the left-most printed column is not ever showing up when printed.
I have a lot of templates to convert to Spreadsheet.com, but they won’t work well without these critical features. There are a lot of things I’d like to see in the future, but these are the most critical to me at the moment.
Hi @matt
I have a question (feature request?) re: exporting/downloading as .pdfs: is it possible to download the files in attachment cells when you download a spreadsheet as a pdf? In other words, is there a simple way to export the spreadsheet and all the attached files all at once? I’d like to export my spreadsheet and have the data in the attachment cells get downloaded as well, perhaps as an “appendix” or something similar.
Hi @Greg_Teves , there is currently no way to bulk download attachments in a worksheet / workbook. The request makes sense and it’s something we will consider as the attachments feature evolves. Meanwhile, we are currently working on V1 of the Spreadsheet.com API, which will likely provide a way to programmatically do this.
