A Note Concerning Web Reports through Ax and SSRS

I had a chat with some colleagues yesterday and ventured into the "new" reporting framework, SSRS, that will gradually replace standard Ax reporting.

Last year I mass produced web reports for portal customers. Being Microsoft product users they experienced problems with Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer "helps you" by removing CSS formatting when the document prints. For some of the reports that resulted in serious issues, as the alternating line color was removed from the formatting, resulting in reports that were, to put it mildly, hard to read.

To enable CSS background color printing, which at least the Ax Web reports use:

Open Internet Explorer -> Options -> Advanced -> Printer -> Enable printing of background colors and images.

 (or something, I have the Norwegian language version and am not 100% sure of what the english version says, but it should be a close match).

My colleagues argued that chiefly the list reports would be targeted for SSRS, and no one would print those. My experiences last year suggest otherwise.

Believe me, the customers want to be able to print any report, and they want to be able to read it easily as well.

The morale of the story?

Enable that CSS formatting.