Reports and printing

Reports & printing

A schedule isn't finished until you can share it — on paper for a site meeting, as an image in a presentation, or as an overview of what's coming up and what has already shifted. That's what the Report tab is for, with three report types and a print preview.

What you'll learn here

• The three report types on the Report tab: Gantt print, milestone overview, variance.
• How the print preview works: paper size, orientation and which elements you toggle on/off.
• How to actually print a report or save it as a file.
• What Ctrl+P does in this app.

Getting to the report screen

There are three ways in to the same screen: click the Report ribbon tab, go to Backstage → Print (which opens the report screen directly), or press Ctrl+P. All three land on the same place — there's no separate "print" dialog; the report screen is the print preview.

The screen is split into two columns: a settings panel on the left with the Report type picker at the top, and a live preview on the right that updates immediately as you change the settings on the left.

The three report types

Gantt print

A full, formatted printout of the Gantt bars — this is the only report type with a settings block:

• Paper: A4, A3 or A1.
• Orientation: landscape or portrait.
• Auto-fit to paper (on = the schedule scales automatically to the chosen size) or a manual zoom slider if you turn auto-fit off.
• Toggles for task names on bars, show completion, critical path, show float, dependencies, weekends and legend.
• A company field (auto-fills from the project setting, but is separately editable here) and the author (read-only, from the project info).

The summary block above it shows the live count of tasks, leaf tasks, critical tasks and relations in the project.

Milestone overview

A table of every milestone in the project: WBS, name, kind (automatic/start/finish), date, the underlying constraint or deadline, float, whether the milestone is mandatory, and status (on schedule / critical / late). The summary block shows the total milestone count, how many are mandatory and how many are late. This report has no paper size/orientation settings — it prints the table exactly as shown.

Variance

Compares the current schedule against the active baseline: baseline start/finish versus current start/finish, the difference in working days for start and finish, and a status per task (on schedule / late / early / new / dropped). If there's no active baseline, the screen states that explicitly instead of showing an empty report. The summary block also shows the shift in the project's finish date in working days, if there is one. See the guide Baselines & progress for how to record a baseline before this report can tell you anything useful.

Printing and exporting

The settings panel always has a Print... button at the bottom — it opens a separate print window containing the report and immediately triggers the browser/OS print dialog. For the Gantt report, that window uses the chosen paper size and orientation; the milestone and variance reports print the table as displayed.

Only the Gantt report also has an Export PDF button. That saves the current preview as an actual PDF file (filename ending in -planning.pdf) — one page sized to the physical dimensions of the chosen paper size and orientation. The PDF file is vector-based: bars, lines and text are stored as PDF drawing instructions rather than a single embedded image, so it stays crisp at any zoom level and the text is selectable and searchable in any PDF viewer. This applies to Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic and Persian text — Arabic and Persian are shaped and embedded as vector text as well. Chinese, Japanese and Korean text is opt-in: install a font extension that supplies those glyphs and it is embedded as vector too (selectable and searchable); without such an extension that text is exported as a raster image — still correctly displayed, but not selectable or searchable. Handy for email or archiving without going through the system print dialog. If you'd rather print directly (or save to PDF via the system dialog, e.g. to pick a different paper size than the one configured above), use Print....

Reports in practice

Each report type serves a different conversation:

• The Gantt report is the classic site-meeting handout: the critical path highlighted, float visible on the non-critical bars, and the legend explaining what each colour means. Turn on task names on bars and show completion if the audience doesn't already know the schedule; turn them off for a clean overview on A1 if a separate task list is handed out alongside it.
• The milestone overview is for anyone who only wants the important dates without paging through dozens of task rows — for example a client who mainly wants to know whether the mandatory handover dates are being met. The ◆ symbol before a milestone name in the table marks a mandatory milestone.
• The variance report is the conversation about correcting course: which tasks are slipping relative to the baseline, and by how many working days. See this report in practice in the showcase Nieuwbouw Appartementencomplex De Vaart, which has two baselines (a contract baseline and a rebaseline after a change order) with their own progress and status date — a good example of how the Δ columns fill in once there's an actual difference between the baseline and the current schedule.

The live preview on the right refreshes on every change to the settings on the left — there's no separate "refresh" button, and nothing is computed only at print time.

Further reading

• A variance report has nothing to compare until a baseline has been recorded — read the guide Baselines & progress.
• The critical path and float shown on the Gantt report come from the same calculation as the Gantt view itself — read the guide Critical path & advanced analysis for how to read that.