SplashIDSplashID
Aug 28

9.4 beta still has printing and exporting issues:9.4 beta still has printing and exporting issues:

I need to make a hardcopy printout of all my records for safekeeping in emergency. I have over 800 records. If I print from within SplashID, it only puts one record on a page, the font is large, there is a lot of wasted white space, and requires over 800 sheets of paper. If I only want to print one record, that is fine. But to print all 800+ it is ridiculous. I can print as pdf and then print 4 pages to one sheet and double sided – that will reduce my page count to 100 – but still impractical. Add ability to allow to customize printing with close spacing and font adjustable. If I export as .csv file, many record fields contain number data (credit card number, phone number etc) that Excel converts to exponential notation. I can change format of whole sheet (all fields) to text and I can set excel to not show exponential format, but it doesn’t seem to work very well. Many numbers still are in exponential unless I open that field to recalculate and then close. I can’t go through all 800+ lines to check all numbers. Is there anyway to make sure number fields are exported as text to excel?
ReviewingReviewing
Aug 29, 2025

We could not take up enhancing the PDF printing feature in 9.4. We will plan for making the PDF printing more flexible in a future major release, quite likely 9.5. As of now we are focussing our efforts to get WiFi sync and cloud sync working reliably, fixing critical issues, and other small enhancements that we can take up as part of the 9.4.x series of releases.

Aug 29, 2025

I'm just a user, but thought I'd give you my $0.02 (further devalued as I'm Canadian). You can remove exponentiation of all records in a column in one step by clicking on the column header (which selects the entire column), then changing the field's number format to suit your needs. I'm sure that many users have pondered the problem of what if SplashID has an issue and my irreplaceable data is gone. I also suspect there are as many solutions to this problem as there are users. Following is my solution and I hope others chime in with theirs. Firstly, I rejected printing my dataset to a hard copy as insecure. Where would I store it? Nowhere is safe other than a safe deposit box, which I don't have and don't want. That leaves me with maintaining an electronic version, and for that I've settled on a PDF file as most convenient. My next realization is that simply printing my almost 800 (and growing) records to a PDF file does not leave me with an entirely workable solution, as the PDF file as created in SplashID is not searchable. So my next step is to import the new file to Adobe and OCR the file, now the file can be searched. Storing the Digital Records As I am not happy with the idea of saving a paper copy of the records anywhere, I'm similarly not happy saving a digital copy anywhere but the cloud. For this, I've settled on using one of the free encrypted cloud storage services (of which there are many) in an account I've created solely and specifically for this one purpose. I have a strict routine, where on the 1st and 15th of every month I create new SVID and PDF backups of my data, upload them to the cloud, leaving 2 previous generations just because I can. I believe the odds of this and Splash ID's information going boom at the same time to be very remote to a point I am comfortable. This is just me, happy to hear if others have settled on different solutions.

Aug 29, 2025

Yes you can format a column as text, but it will still display the value as exponential until you edit the cell. This is a pain to find all cells and edit them (F2, enter). After much searching, I have found another much better method to get a longer than 15 digit number string exported from SplashID into an excel file and display properly. Turns out, SplashID does export a csv file with all the digits of a string included properly, but when that is saved on your computer, it appears to be identified as an Excel csv file. When you click that, Excel opens it as csv, but with it's formatting rules: numbers are truncated to 15 digits, long strings are converted to exponential, and the file is corrupted. The solution is to 1. start with exporting the csv file from SID 2. Open a new blank excel.xlsx file. 3. Now on the tabs at the top select Data/Get Data/From File/From Text/CSV 4. Find the fresh/virgin csv file from Step 1 and select it and press Import at bottom right area. 5. A window will open of a partial worksheet. I just went down to the Load button and pressed it. 6. My new xlsx file is now populated as text with all the data from SplashID properly shown. It also shows field labels. But the main thing is that I now have an excel file with complete numbers accurately showing for credit cards and other items. Remember - Do Not open that SplashID exported csv file with excel - it will convert it improperly. You have to import it.

Aug 29, 2025

In Excel, select the column the with the exponential values, then select and open the "Number" section in the Ribbon. Select number, 0 decimal places, and OK. You will have converted the exponential values in the column to their true numerical values