Better formatting options for PDF reports

Those columns are the MAC address and Notes Columns as those provide no value to our Nurse leads and faculty outside of the IT field. These columns also introduce a restriction in the label column as the character count is now decreased and prevents the label showing as one line. The readability of this report is greatly hurt and is widely cited during feedback sessions with nurse leadership.

I also take note of how the report doesn’t appear to sort by any logical column. We typically would just filter by name or the days since last used but in either case the report being generated appears to be random at first glance.


The other aspect is the ordering of the columns. Below is an example report we send out to Leaders that request the status of their fleet. The only column not typically featured in the final table sent to our partners is device version column but was featured here as that was used for filtering in this case.

Looking at the documentation in Pubs, I understand there is a possibility of generating a template for a custom report by creating essentially a JSON file with the tables and columns within the database of Analytics but having an intuitive way to create a template to make the column ordering and such that can closely align with the example I’ve shown is the goal.

I’ve been researching and been experimenting with other ways of automating these reports as a result where I might just use the csv file I already pull daily from Analytics but the time savings would be massive if we can just use the reporting aspect that’s baked into analytics as long as those PDFs can be generate correctly. Majority of our staff do not have access to an excel viewer and having a PDF is easily the best option for reports being sent by email.

Thanks again and I hope this provides enough information.

Paxton Powers

System Administrator

Information Systems


  • Guest
  • May 17 2023
  • Attach files