FYI:Printing Landscaped Reports in Reporting Services

  • Just wanted to share something I learned today in debugging an issue with reporting services not properly printing landscaped reports.  This is one of those "duh" type things, but I suspect a lot of developers will run into it.

    In the original release of reporting services, there were problems with automated printing of landscaped reports.  If you search the web you will see custom code out there to work around that problem [for example: http://www.codeproject.com/vb/net/RSPrintLandscape.asp ]  This issue has been resolved in reporting services 2005. HOWEVER - it may not be all that obvious to a new developer.

    To make sure reports come out as landscape you must:

    1) In the report designer - PROPERTIES window, choose "Report"

    2) For INTERACTIVE SIZE -> Make width =11in, height=8.5in (or whatever size and orientation you want)

    3) For PAGE SIZE -> Make width =11in, height=8.5in (or whatever size and orientation you want)

    This will make it print in landscape, not only for a .pdf export, but also when you print directly from your browser using the printer icon link in the default reporting services web front end.  Note that the total number of pages in your report can be different in the on-screen rendered report from the printed version, as well as different in the .pdf rendered version (three different renderings and three different numbers for total pages in your report).

    Note: I foresee a common problem where people make the report itself in landscaped dimensions (i.e. Body- size property) but forget to change the properties I mentioned above.  This will leave them wondering why their report isn't coming out as landscape.

    Also note that your report body width + report magins (another property that can be found under "report" in the properties window) should equal your paper size. For example, if your left and right margin is set to .5in, then your report body width should not exceed 10 inchs (10+.5+.5=11inches which is the width of your landscaped standard 8.5x11 paper).

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  • Thx for this useful posting. My report properties are as you describe (screen shot attached). Both the Size and Interactive Size properties are 11" wide by 8.5" high so I was hoping for it to print landscape. It is the correct width on screen in a browser. It exports to landscape perfectly in PDF and Excel. When I use the print button it defaults to portrait and spills onto another page.

    My report body is 10" wide with 0.5" L&R margins.

    Any ideas why this would not print landscape?

  • Hmmm, not sure really, but I would try reducing the margins (most printers can handle .25") just to see if that fixes the problem...

  • Thx, I will give it a go. I went for 0.5" margins because this is the default used by the RSClientPrint ActiveX control. As far as I can tell the only way to change it is manually at time of print preview. This MSDN doc seems to suggest that the control cannot determine margins automatically the way that PDF export does.

  • Is there any way to make the data on the page number you see on the SSRS web server print the same data in hardcopy?

    Background: My internal client clicks on an item in the document map and it takes her to the corresponding page in a sizeable report. She then looks at the top of the screen and sees the page number (i.e. Page 22 of 49). She then clicks the print icon and wants to be able to print only that page (page 22). I see that you noted that with 3 renderings you could get 3 different number of pages. Is there a work-around?

  • Sorry, don't know of a workaround. I agree that it would be nice to have some consistency though.

  • FWIW, we advise our internal clients who want to selectively print pages of large docs to:

    - export to PDF

    - search for the page they want

    - print current page or range.

    Not sure if that fits in with your workflow to identify the pages that need to be printed. Would work if the field that you use to navigate in the document map also appeared in a group header. Suboptimal, but kinder to trees than printing.

  • Thank you. I'll suggest the PDF idea, though this would make the document map useless. We're trying to convert reports from Crystal to SSRS and I know they're going to complain about that fact that it works in Crystal so why are we making things more time and effort intensive. Grouping headers are a good idea but they're looking for unique ids (sequence numbers) so you can't really group them in this report.

  • Thank you so much for the tips. It works for me. Thanks again.

  • Thanks for the tips. Solved both my landscape .pdf export and printing issues.

  • It really helps me with landscape printing. Thanks for the tip! :w00t:

  • Thanks for posting it, in fact went through the same issue couple of days back.

    Thanks

  • Thank you so much. This really works for me, Thanks again.

  • When you convert Crystal to SSRS, you may try Crystal Migration Services, it can convert the page setting of Crystal to SSRS. Here is the site.

    http://www.crystalmigrater.com/Default.aspx

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