Printing an excel sheet from within DT doesn't work properly

When I try print an excel sheet from within DT, then part of the sheet is cut off, i.e. it doesn’t print the sheet properly. I always have to open the sheet in excel and print from there, which is quite time-consuming.

Is there a way of printing excel sheets from within DT properly?

No. :frowning:

DEVONthink displays Excel (and other Office files) using the Quicklook plugin that Microsoft provided for those files. When DEVONthink prints those files, it is printing the Quicklook preview for the file, and is not able to do any formatting of that image - that’s why you get the cut offs in Excel, bad formatting in Word, etc. (You might file a bug report with Microsoft?)

There’s nothing DEVONthink can do to modify the situation. Rule of thumb: use that file’s native editor to print any file whose type is not RTF or RTFD, text, sheet or PDF.

Sorry I’m not a software expect, but just curious - is it a copyright law that prohibits DT from coding a viewer that displays, say, word docs properly? Or is it a matter of DT having to pay money to Microsoft in order to gain the legal permission to code such a viewer?

I’m just thinking that non-Microsoft software like Apple’s Preview and OpenOffice are able to display word docs properly and wonder how they do it? Would they have paid money to Microsoft in order to be allowed to code viewers?

Over here, Preview shows the same badly-formatted view of Word, Excel, Powerpoint files as DEVONthink does - because Preview uses the same Microsoft-provided Quicklook plugins as DEVONthink. OpenOffice is doing more than previewing, it is an editor for Word documents, which DEVONthink isn’t.