Hi - Wanted to see if anyone had tested this yet?
We normally can export to Excel from Epicor and Excel opens right up from a classic screen
In Kinetic, when we chose the “Export to Excel” option it always just prompts us to save the file first, which is annoying. Is this a setting somewhere we can change?
Thanks
The reason that in the new web based UI we don’t open files up automatically is because that’s not something websites can force for security reasons. Websites can send you a file to download but they can’t force you to actually open it or run it instead they ask you what you want to do with the file so that say websites can’t send you surprising applications that just start running unexpectedly.
But you can tell the browser - i want xlsx files to always open immediately in excel and get the same experience it just takes selecting a quick option after you download one time. Here’s chrome for example. I have my xlsx download from doing an excel export and can tell it to just open these files immediately in the future. If you do this once it’ll just open excel the next time you do it from our app or any other website so you can get basically the same experience.
HI Brian,
Thanks for replying. We actually don’t use the web based version. We are cloud based but use the installed version. I don’t see that option to select from your screen shot thru the installed version, it just automatically forces up the “Save as” window.
Any ideas?
Use the web version.
Ok you have a point there which i’m going to go investigate if we ought to change in the software. We control that embedded browser ourselves including what happens when it downloads a file it probably should expose the same option as chrome at least.
Thank you for considering. It would be a big adjustment for our users since we only user the installed version.
HI Brian,
Is the embedded version part of the future roadmap for Epicor along with the web version? Or is Web only the long term future? Not sure if you would know an answer for that but figured you would be a good person to ask.
Thank
you
100% web is the future, however we have not ruled out that there may be some need to have some kind of client installation still around. We have an edge agent now for example for local connected things.
Also, I did take this one up with the team that maintains the in-client browser and we’re discussing a small feature add to support a similar flow as I’d suggested above.
So far my experiences with the UI forms/apps/pages has been slightly better performance via web browsers (Firefox and Chrome) but until PDF viewing/document viewing is improved, I can’t see it as suitable for a lot of production environments. There needs to be some form of PDF viewing/preview functionality available when using a browser, if there isn’t already that I haven’t noticed/found yet.
Having to open the notification pane, click a generated report, then download and or open a report separately is just way too many steps for situations where users like to, and request to be able to, view reports regularly within transaction processing scenarios. Particularly if they’re coming from systems that synchronously display the report outputs utilizing really efficient reporting stacks.
I understand that due to the nature of the browser based access having a session spanned across multiple tabs, as opposed to a single system monitor per session being used, that the event, trigger, and display pattern complexity and overhead may require a bit more work but it should definitely be doable based on how many other solutions display PDF previews easily enough.
Supporting Office 365 Online, or another similar service, for Excel and Word document previews I presume would be another level of challenge, but also doable based on other applications/services. Although, likely also far less important compared to PDFs for the vast majority of Epicor customers/users.
PS: Having the option to designate specific reports to be generated and displayed synchronously would also be a major improvement in general too. For situations such as counter sales where viewing say a quote document prior to it being printed or emailed is often highly desired/requested by end users. I understand from UX/performance perspectives there’s arguments and scenarios where this would not be ideal but given that with decent hardware and software setups most reports generate easily under 2 seconds now, the scenarios where it wouldn’t make sense and trade-offs would now be significantly less than they once were.
Hi Callum,
In fact, there is a tool called Edge Agent that you can install on workstations. It will allow you to send a job to the printer directly.
Enable the Edge Agent functionality: https://kinetichelp.epicor.com/hc/en-us/articles/360059917292-Enabling-Edge-Agent-Download-for-Client-Printing
Install the Edge Agent: https://kinetichelp.epicor.com/hc/en-us/articles/360051774172-Understanding-Reports
Good luck
Thanks, Alexandre. I had a look at the help documentation and tried installing it but for my initial test installations I couldn’t get it to work on either a development application server or client machine - potentially due to security issues or similar.
The minimal current help documentation that I could see refers to printing, and primarily around client printers, with no mention of report previewing, attachment previewing, or attachment downloading. If you have it working, experience with it in action, or knowledge about feature plans, does it have any functionality in these areas or is there plans for it to?
