How do I send a printout to a file?

Summary

For any document that you produce from Platinum to a printer, you can also save it to a text file by overriding the printer output. The following article outlines how this is done.

Overriding the Printout

• Press <Alt+P> just before you hit the print button (eg: F2)
• This will bring up a "Print Record Override" box. You can then press <F1> to go forwards through the print record numbers or <Shift+F1> to go back, there should be a print record 99 which should have the description of "Print to File"
• Press <S+F10> to go into the print record details and check the "Print Device" Line. This should read "..\sxicons\output\NoPrint.TXT". This is the name of the file that the print will go to once the print has finished. This can be altered but the default should be fine.
• Press <Esc> and click [Accept]
• Press <Esc> again to take you back to the "Print Record Override" box
• Press <Enter> to accept the override
• Press the appropriate button to start the print (eg: F5)

PLEASE NOTE: The system will look like the document is being printed but this is actually the file being saved to the specified name

Viewing the file

There are 2 ways of opening a document printed to file and they are as follows:

• On the Pcs windows desktop there should be an icon called "Platinum folder". Within here there should be another folder called "Output". Within here if the default setting have been used there will be a file called "NoPrint.TXT" This can be double left clicked to open in notepad.

• Or if for some reason the above method does not work or you do not wish to minimise Platinum, you can do the following:
  • Press <Alt+P>
  • This will bring up the "Print Record Override" box. You can then press <F1> to go forwards through the print record numbers or <Shift+F1> to go back, and there should be a print record 99 which should have the description of "Print to File"
• Press <S+F10> to go into the print record details
  • Arrow key down to the "Print Device" Line
  • Press <Alt+O> to open the file

PLEASE NOTE: Bear in mind in both cases the "Print to file" text file will be APPENDED with every new printout. In other words if for example 2 reports are printed to file one after the other, the second report will add itself to the bottom of the first. This is ideal for month end prints as it means all printouts related to a particular month can be stored in the same file. However if you need each print to be in a separate text file, this file can be renamed by right clicking it and selecting "Rename" to a different file name.

TIP: If you wish to open for example a fixed width style Platinum report in Excel all you need to do is go to File -> Open within Excel and browse to the location of the "NOPRINT.TXT" specified in the "Print Device" line and use the "Text import wizard" to chop the info into columns. Some reports will work better then others when doing this but for the most part after chopping the page headings out once in Excel it's a good way to manipulate report outputs quickly for those more au-fait with Excel

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Keywords AND Misspellings

Printing, File, No, Printout