Advanced Spreadsheets and Reporting Documentation
Index

Preview & Printing

Preview mode presents a spreadsheet as a polished, read-only report — page regions become tabs, editing chrome disappears, and slicers stay interactive. Printing follows the same page structure.

Page Regions

A Page region marks a rectangular area of the sheet (for example A1:J40) that:

  • becomes a tab in preview mode (Power BI style, at the bottom), and
  • prints as its own sheet.

The region's Description is the tab caption and the printed page heading (blank falls back to the Region ID). The tab order follows the Region ID, so IDs like P1, P2 order the tabs deliberately. An optional Background Color (a hex value like #F5F7FA) fills the page in preview and print; blank keeps the default white surface.

The typical dashboard pattern is one page region over the presentable part of the sheet, leaving helper calculations outside it — the preview then shows only the finished dashboard.

Set up page regions like any other region: Regions → New Region → Page, or the Settings action on an existing one. In the editor a page region draws only a dashed outline; it produces no cell values.

Preview Mode

Open the preview with the Preview toolbar button in the editor, or the Preview action on the Spreadsheets list. From the editor, unsaved changes are saved first (a new sheet asks for a code).

In preview:

  • The sheet is read-only — with one exception: slicer picks still work, so a viewer can flip the dashboard's period, dimension or item and watch it recalculate. This is enforced in the engine, not just hidden in the UI.
  • Page regions render as tabs at the bottom. A sheet without page regions shows the whole used range as a single tab.
  • Drill-down still works: Ctrl+click a region cell opens the record or entries behind it.
  • Financial report, budget, query, report, SQL, pivot and FlowField regions keep their per-region refresh button (↻) for re-running their data sources, and the preview has a refresh control to recalculate the whole sheet.

Users whose access level is Read Only (or Read Only No Print) are always routed to preview — the editor never opens for them. Slicer picks made in a preview opened from the editor carry back to the editor when the preview closes (both show the same live state).

Example: A Monthly Report Pack

A finance sheet holds three deliverables plus its working area:

Region ID Description Range
P1 Executive Summary A1:M45 — KPI cards and charts
P2 Income Statement A47:H110 — a financial report region
P3 Top Customers A112:F140 — a pivot region

The helper formulas live from column AA, outside every page. In Preview, the sheet shows three clean tabs — Executive Summary, Income Statement, Top Customers — ordered by their IDs, and none of the helper clutter. A ?RANGE period slicer inside P1 stays clickable, so a viewer can flip the month and all three tabs recalculate. Print produces exactly three sheets, one per page, each with its heading.

Printing

File → Print in the toolbar prints the sheet through the browser's print dialog:

  • With page regions, each page region prints as its own sheet, with the page's name as a heading and a page break in between.
  • Without page regions, the sheet's used range prints as a single page.
  • A completely empty sheet reports "Nothing to print".
  • Users at the Read Only (No Print) level get a status message instead — printing is blocked for them.

Export to Excel

File → Export to Excel in the editor, or the Excel button in the preview's tab bar, downloads the sheet as an .xlsx workbook named after the sheet. The file is a snapshot of what the sheet shows at that moment:

  • Worksheets follow the page structure, like printing: with page regions, each page becomes its own worksheet holding that rectangle, moved so the page's top-left corner is A1, with the page's background colour on the tab. Without page regions the whole sheet is one worksheet.
  • Every cell becomes a plain Excel cell. Formula cells travel as their results (sheet formulas are AL expressions, not Excel formulas), slicer cells as the current pick, and region cells as the values they render — nothing in the workbook stays connected to Business Central.
  • Numbers stay numbers, dates stay dates. A cell's number format (thousands separators, decimals, percent, currency, red or parenthesised negatives, trend arrows, date patterns) becomes the matching Excel number format, so the values still calculate in Excel.
  • Styles come along: bold, italic, underline, text and fill colours, font and size, horizontal and vertical alignment, and the colours conditional formats applied. Region header rows are bold with a rule beneath. Dragged column widths and row heights are kept.
  • Table regions become real Excel tables — filter buttons, banded rows, a name formulas can refer to (SALES[Amount]) — over the header row and the first page of their rows (the page size set on the region), not the whole filtered table. A records-across region or one without headers stays plain cells. Pivot, financial report, budget matrix, query, report, SQL, FlowField and Date Range regions export exactly the cells they render.
  • Chart regions become native Excel charts over the same rectangle: column, bar, line and area (stacked or not), pie and doughnut, with the region's title, legend, value labels, gridlines, value decimals and series colours. The series point at the exported cells, so the chart still reflects them in Excel. When a chart on a page reads cells outside that page — support formulas from column AA, say — the values are copied into a small block to the right of the page content and the chart reads them there. A Waterfall chart has no Excel counterpart and exports as columns of its first series.
  • KPI cards become text: the card's rectangle receives its label, its value as a real number (with the card's decimals), the delta line with its arrow and compare label, and the target or status line — one per row, merged across the card's width, in the card's colours with the accent as a left border. A card one row tall lays the lines across; a single cell keeps just the value. The trend sparkline, progress bar and donut are not drawn.
  • Images are not exported; the cells beneath them are.

An empty sheet reports that there is nothing to export. Users at the Read Only (No Print) level do not see the export — taking the content out of the system follows the same rule as printing.