When building reports, you may want to include sheets in the spreadsheet that you don’t want printed in your packaged PDF (e.g. side calculations, lookup tables and reference notes). This is done by putting a hashtag in front of the sheet name.
As an example, let’s say we want to add comments for accounts in a dynamic report (i.e. a report wherein the accounts are not named in the template but depend upon on the synced accounts). This can be done by creating a non-printing comments sheet named “#comments” with a table of account names and comments. Then use VLOOKUP in the printing report to find comments included in the final PDF.
Figure 1 shows what the “#comments” sheet might look like:
Fig. 1
Figure 2 shows what the main report template looks like:
Fig. 2
In column C of the account rows of the main report sheet, use the following spreadsheet function:
=if(ISNA(vlookup(trim(A7), ‘#comments’!$A$1:$B$25, 2, false)), “”, vlookup(trim(A7), ‘#comments’!$A$1:$B$25, 2, false))
Figure 3 shows where this formula is placed for Cost of Goods Sold. A similar formula with rows replacing the “A7” is used for the Income and Expense accounts.
Fig. 3
When you include this report in a package and download the package to PDF, the “#comments” sheet does not print into the PDF. Only the report sheet with your sync data plus the comments pulled from “#comments” with VLOOKUP will be in the PDF.
See Figure 4 for the final PDF report.
Fig. 4
Non-printing hashtag sheets are only available in PDF downloaded from packages. If you export the PDF from within the report editor itself, that PDF will always include all sheets from the report.
In conclusion, there are many situations where you may want non-printing sheets in your report template. To make sheets non-printing simply set the first letter of the sheet name to hashtag (the # character) and it will not be included in the PDF package when it’s downloaded.