Viewing Reports in the Browser vs Downloading to Your Desktop
PowerSchool reports are often delivered as PDFs in the Report Queue. When you click on the 'View' link, the browser will do one of three things depending on its settings:
- Download the file to your computer, often to your desktop
- Open the document outside the browser using another program (such as Adobe Reader or Preview)
- Open the document in the browser window itself
Many people have asked how to stop the downloading madness because it clutters up their desktops with tons of copies of reports. You need to adjust the browser's preferences to open PDF files instead of saving them.
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In Firefox, look under the Firefox menu for Preferences. In the Applications tab you will find a list of different kinds of documents and have the option to specify what action the browser should take when that sort of file is encountered. Scroll down to Portable Document Format (PDF) and click on the arrow at the right end. Select 'Use Preview' or, if you prefer, select 'Use other' and select Adobe Reader from the applications folder.
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In Safari, the concept is the same but the location of the preference file is a little different.
If you use Safari and have Adobe Reader installer, you may not have run into the desktop clutter issue. This is because Adobe Reader happens to include a special little add-on that looks for PDFs and opens them right in the browser window. Because of this special relationship, you actually go to the Adobe Reader preferences under the Internet category to adjust the settings.
If you do not want to use Adobe Reader as the viewer, unclick the top option. The second option, the fast web view, is what opens the PDF right in the browser window. If you would rather it opened in Adobe Reader in its own window, unclick that option.
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