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Blackline PDF's of Changed Pages Only

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Comments

8 comments

  • Kenneth Ho

    Hi Barbara, we did experience the issue and have avoided using it for the time being.  

    Ken

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  • Katherine Loudermilk

    We had this problem also and caught it purely by chance - because I mistakenly forgot to select "only pages with changes."   Then, when I did export only pages with changes, I noticed it was missing half of the pages that contained changes.  We need to be able to trust that when we send Only Pages with Changes to our recipients that they are seeing all of the changes.  For now, we are still spending the extra time to PDF a full blackline and then manually deleting pages without changes. We would like Workiva to confirm this is no longer an issue before we use this feature again.  Thank you, Katherine

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  • Mike

    Hi all!

    Thanks for bringing this up. I can do a little digging here to confirm on our end. Hold tight.

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  • Mike

    A quick update here.

    In mid January an issue was identified  where changes were inadvertently being omitted from the "changed page only" PDF option, specifically changes made within a table. That issue was escalated and was ultimately resolved at the end of January. I am not finding any other issues reported in that same timeframe for blackline PDFs.

    Barbara Wheeler Kenneth Ho Katherine Loudermilk were the issues you were seeing also limited to changes in tables?

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  • Katherine Loudermilk

    Mike,

    I am disappointed that Workiva did not notify it's customers that this was an issue when it was discovered.  If I didn't accidentally notice the problem, I would have continued sending incorrect blacklines.   How many people sent out erroneous blacklines and were never told they need to revise them or do damage control. Then, it is disappointing Workiva didn't notify us that the issue has been resolved so that we can begin using this function again.   However, to answer your question, the issues were only in tables.  I only saved down one example back in January because I stopped using it.  In that example, the missing changes were all in tables.  The "changed page only" report properly picked up several tables with changes, but then it left out a few tables that had changes.  It did not leave out any changes in the narratives.  Thank you for looking into this for us.

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  • Barbara Wheeler

    Although I didn't document the blackline(s) that didn't run correctly for me (so I'm not sure if the omissions were all in tables), I did look back at my e-mail to Support that said the Balance Sheet and some subsequent changed pages weren't included, so that would hint that the changes not showing up were in tables.  I agree with Katherine though.  Please tell the Support team to be more communicative in this regard.  The most important thing would be to know there's a problem so we don't unknowingly run a false report, but also, I had a ticket open on this so when it was resolved, how come I wasn't notified?

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  • Mike

    Thanks for double checking. That does mesh with our findings. I can at least reassure you that the "changed page" option for blackline PDFs is functioning as expected now.

    Digging deeper into what happened, it seems what occurred was a mix of bad timing and poor communication. Sadly, it looks you were early in hitting this issue, which didn't get flagged and pushed to our engineers until later. That is partially why your issue wasn't connected as part of the issue.

    I don't have all the data yet on on the total impact of this issue (i.e. if it was all users, or just particular cases) but regardless, you are correct, we could and should have done better at communicating the issue and its resolution. As we strive to more transparent, you definitely have given us some good food for thought.

    Please let me know if I can help answer any further questions, or if you need anything else. Thanks again for sharing your experience and happy blacklining!

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  • Barbara Wheeler

    I've recently noticed that if there's only a change to a caption within a table (and no other change on that page), the page is not included in the pdf of changed pages only. It seems there has to be a change to a number. For instance, I had some caption changes to the Statement of Cash Flows (increase/decrease) with no other changes to the table. The page did not pull in. However, because number changes to a table were resulting in the changed page being included in the pdf (from our past testing of the problem), I decided to change a number on the SCF. The pdf then included that page and reflected all changes. But, merely making a change to the caption doesn't seem to trigger the page to pull into the pdf. So, I'm back to not using this functionality, but instead, running a full pdf for manually deleting the pages with no changes. Please prioritize the functionality to actually "run" the blackline of changed pages only within the app (rather than just changed sections) so we don't have to rely on the next step of running the pdf to extract what we need which isn't working correctly anyway. Thanks.

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