Action Buttons And Exporting

A list screen is not only something to read. Around the rows sit the buttons that let you do something — add a record, refresh what you are looking at, take the whole filtered result and turn it into a spreadsheet, or run whatever your administrator has built for your business. This chapter covers those buttons, and covers exporting in full.

What This Is

Buttons on a list screen live in a small number of fixed places. Which buttons appear, what they are called and which of these places they sit in are all decided per application, but the places themselves are always the same.

The three-dots button is the important one for this chapter. It carries no text label and no tooltip. By default it sits at the bottom of the list next to the paging controls, and its menu opens upward.

Note Everything below is configurable. Your administrator decides which buttons exist, what they are called, which icon they carry and where they sit. If a button described here is missing on your screen, that is a setup decision rather than a fault — see Why Your Screen Differs.

Why It Matters

Two reasons.

The first is export. Getting data out of the application and into a spreadsheet is one of the most common things a business user needs, and the behavior has enough corners — background jobs, expiry, size limits — that guessing at it wastes an afternoon.

The second is that custom action buttons are where your application stops being a generic data tool and starts doing your organization's actual work: issuing a document, sending a reminder, moving a batch of records to the next stage. Those buttons were written for your business by someone who knew what they were for. Knowing how to read them — and when to ask before pressing — is worth a few minutes.

Where The Buttons Are

Next To The Screen Heading

Top right of the list screen, on the same line as the title. By default this is a single filled button whose caption is new item followed by a plus icon.

Two things change it:

• Your administrator can rename it per screen, so you are more likely to see New invoice, Add applicant or something similar in your own application.
• It only appears if you are allowed to create that kind of record, and if the screen has been set up to offer it. A read-only screen has no add button at all.

Clicking it opens a blank form, usually in a pop-up window. See Creating And Editing Records.

Inside The Filter Bar

The strip of small bordered buttons above the rows. Most of them shape what you are looking at (filters, columns, grouping, calculations) and belong to other chapters. Two are worth naming here:

• Refresh — a circular-arrow icon, with no text. It re-runs the list exactly as it stands.
• Save query — a bookmark icon, also with no text. It opens a small panel headed Save query that keeps the current arrangement as a saved view.

Both are covered in Saved Views And Queries.

Under The List, On The Right

The three-dots button. Its menu holds:

• The screen's export entries.
• Any custom actions your administrator has added to this screen, with optional separator lines between them.
• Last of all, for users who are allowed to edit screens, a separator and an entry that opens the editor for these actions. If you see that entry, ignore it — it changes the screen for everyone.

Until somebody customizes the menu it contains the export entries and nothing else. Once it has been customized, the order is whatever your administrator arranged, and the exports can even be left out of it entirely.

The menu is built from what you are permitted to run, so two colleagues can open the same menu and see different entries.

Note The button is drawn whether or not it has anything to offer. If your role has not been granted the export permissions and you cannot edit screens, the three dots open an empty box. That is not a fault — it means there is nothing there for you. See Roles, Groups And Permissions.

This menu belongs to the table layouts and to the files list. On cards, a simple list, a board or a calendar there is no three-dots button, and it cannot be added to them — the export menu is not one of the pieces those layouts can hold. If your screen offers a layout switcher, switching to the table layout is the way to get the export menu back. See List Screens.

Anywhere Else On The Screen

Your administrator can drop extra buttons into five places around a list screen — left and right of the heading, above the rows, and to the left and right below the rows — and into the filter bar itself. These custom buttons can carry any text, icon and color, and they can open a link, open another screen, or run a process. They can also be given a rule that decides whether they appear at all, so a button may be there one day and not the next.

That is why the same application can have a Generate monthly report button sitting boldly next to the heading on one screen and nothing at all on the next.

The Standard Buttons

Adding A Record

Covered above and in Creating And Editing Records.

Refreshing

A list never updates itself. Once the rows are on your screen they stay exactly as they were fetched, even if a colleague edits one of them a second later. The refresh button re-runs the same query with the same filters, sorting, grouping, page size and page number, so you get current data without losing your arrangement.

Refresh before you export, before you take a screenshot for someone, and before you make a decision from what is on screen. Full detail in Saved Views And Queries.

Exporting

The rest of this chapter.

Custom Actions Built For Your Application

Beyond adding, refreshing and exporting, everything you see is specific to your application. Your administrator can create actions and give each one a name, an icon and a place to appear.

What They Can Do

An action button can:

• Run a process — generate a document, send an e-mail or a message, create related records, change a status, post something to another system, recalculate figures. This is by far the most common kind.
• Open another screen inside the application — a purpose-built page such as a summary, a report or a small form.
• Open an external address — a supplier portal, a mapping service, an accounting system. Whether such a button opens in a new browser tab or replaces your current page is decided per button.
• Show information only — on a record's own buttons, some entries are labels rather than buttons. They are drawn grayed out and cannot be clicked; they exist to tell you something about the record.

There is no way to tell from the outside which of these a given button is, other than its name and what your colleagues know about it.

Names And Icons Are Chosen Locally

Nothing about a custom button's wording comes from the product. Approve, Send to accounting, Vygenerovat fakturu — all of it is text somebody typed when the button was created. The same applies to the export entries, which can be renamed and re-iconed per screen. If your application calls its export Download to Excel, that is the same feature described below under a local name.

List Actions Versus Record Actions

This is the distinction that matters most in practice, and it is readable from where you found the button.

Two consequences worth holding on to:

• A custom button placed around the list does not notice which rows you have checked. Checking three rows and then pressing a button next to the heading runs it over everything the list is currently showing you, all pages included.
• A button in the three-dots menu does notice. Checking three rows and then choosing an entry there restricts it to those three. Selection is covered in Selecting Records And Bulk Actions.

There is one more wrinkle. When an action is run over many records from a row menu, it is normally carried out once per record — thirty selected records means the action runs thirty times. Some actions are deliberately built to run once for the whole set instead. You cannot tell which from the button. If it matters, ask.

Reading A Button Before You Press It

Action buttons are not previews. Most of them change data, and there is no undo anywhere in the application.

Before pressing an unfamiliar button:

1. Read where it is. A button under the list or next to the heading acts on everything you can currently see across all pages. That is a much bigger blast radius than a button in a single row's menu.
2. Check your filter first. For a list-wide action, whatever your filter currently matches is the target. Narrow it before you press, not after.
3. Do not rely on a confirmation. Some actions ask "are you sure" in a plain browser dialog; most do not. The absence of a prompt says nothing about how significant the action is.
4. Ask if the name is not self-explanatory. Your administrator, or the colleague who requested the button, knows exactly what it does.

Example A projects list has a button under the rows called Close and archive. A project manager filters to one client, checks three finished projects and chooses it — three projects are archived. A week later a colleague uses the same button with no rows checked and no filter applied, and archives every project in the system. Both behaved exactly as documented; only one of them thought about it first.

Why A Button Appears On One Row But Not The Next

Custom actions can be gated on the record itself. Send invoice may be offered on an invoice that is ready and hidden on one that is still a draft. Approve may appear only on requests assigned to you.

So an action vanishing is usually the application saying "not for this record, not right now" rather than something being broken. If you believe a button should be there, note which record you were on before asking — that is the first thing anyone will want to know.

Exporting To A Spreadsheet

Export takes what your list screen is showing and writes it into an Excel workbook (.xlsx), which opens in Excel, LibreOffice, Numbers and Google Sheets. That is the only format the built-in export produces: there is no built-in CSV or PDF export from a list. (A custom action built for your application may still produce a document of its own — that is a different feature.)

You will normally find two entries in the three-dots menu, both with a spreadsheet icon:

Either or both may be missing: each is granted separately to your role, and the full export is never offered on screens whose data comes from a query an administrator wrote by hand.

What Ends Up In The File

Both exports build the file from the list as you have arranged it.

Columns. The columns you have displayed, in the order you have them, with the same headings the list shows — including any renaming your administrator applied and any column you added yourself with the column picker. Columns you hid are not in the file. Fields that exist on the record but are not displayed as columns are not in the file either; if you need one, add it as a column first and then export. If one of your columns is set up to unfold into several columns in the file, those land after the rest rather than in place. See Columns, Grouping, Merging And Calculations.

Rows. Your filters are honored in full — the filter conditions, the on-screen quick filters, the tags you filtered by and the folder you are in. Your sorting is honored too, so the file arrives in the order you see.

Grouping. If you have a grouping applied, records that belong to the same group stay together and the groups come out in the same order as on screen. The file has no group heading rows and no sub-totals — grouping affects the order, not the shape.

Merging. If you have merged records into one line each, the file contains those merged lines. The merged-count column does not carry its numbers across, so if you need the counts, work them out in the spreadsheet.

Calculations. Totals, averages and counts shown under the list are not written into the file. Rebuild them in the spreadsheet.

The shape of the sheet. One header row in bold with a line under it, then one row per record, and an Excel filter switched on across the used range so you can sort and filter it immediately. Fields holding several values are stacked on separate lines inside a single cell.

Values. Numeric fields come across as numbers, so totals work in the spreadsheet. Formatted text fields arrive as plain text. Date and time values arrive in a plain, unformatted form rather than the way they appear on screen, so a spreadsheet may treat them as text — convert the column if you need to sort or calculate by date. Password-like fields are always empty.

File name. Export - <screen title> - <timestamp>.xlsx, for example Export - Invoices - 20260410093012.xlsx. The timestamp is there so that repeated exports from the same screen are told apart in your downloads folder.

Exporting The Page You Are Looking At

Choose the page export entry and the file is built immediately and downloaded by your browser a moment later. Nothing appears in the Jobs tray, because nothing ran in the background.

Two things to know:

• It takes the whole page, not the rows you have checked. Checking three rows and choosing the page export still gives you all twenty (or fifty, or a hundred) rows currently drawn.
• The download link works exactly once. If the download did not arrive — a browser blocked it, or you closed the tab too quickly — do not try to re-use the link from your browser's download history. Run the export again.

Use it when you want a quick look at a handful of rows in a spreadsheet. For anything real, use the full export.

Exporting Everything The List Matches

Choose the full export entry and the answer comes back almost immediately — not the file, but a message strip in the corner of the screen:

Export started — the file will download once it's ready. Keep this tab open.

The list is not exported inside that click. It is handed to a background worker, and the browser is released so you can keep working. Meanwhile:

1. A row appears in the Jobs tray in the top bar — the inbox icon — with the status Running… and a dot on the icon.
2. Your open page watches the job, re-checking at least every ten seconds.
3. When the file is ready the row flips to Ready and the download starts by itself.
4. The row stays in the tray, with a Download button, so you can fetch the file again — useful if your browser blocked the automatic download.

The important qualifier is the one in the message: keep this tab open. It is the open page that notices the file is ready and starts the download. You may move around the application freely — open other screens, edit records, use another browser tab — but if you close the tab that started the export, nothing pulls the file down for you, and by the time you come back it may already have expired.

Four further facts, each of which catches people out:

• The full export covers the entire filtered result, not the page you are on. Ten thousand matching records with a page size of twenty gives a file with ten thousand rows.
• It does honor checked rows. If you have rows checked when you choose it, only those rows are exported. If you meant to export everything, clear the checkboxes first.
• The job list belongs to your browser, not to your account. An export started on your office computer is invisible on your laptop, on your phone and in a private window, and clearing your browsing data removes the list.
• Files expire. A finished export is kept on the server for a short window — on the order of an hour or two. After that the file cannot be recovered: the download stops working, and a job the application was still watching disappears from the tray behind a warning strip telling you the export has expired. Run the export again. Download the file the day you make it.

The Jobs tray itself — statuses, the dot, removing rows — is covered in Notifications And Alerts.

Exports are never e-mailed to you. For a full export, the tray is the only place the finished file can be picked up.

When A Very Large Export Stops Early

A full export has a deliberate ceiling. If it has been writing rows for roughly ten minutes, or if the file has grown large enough that continuing would risk exhausting the server, the export stops where it is on purpose, finishes writing what it has and hands you a valid file.

You are told in a warning message strip when the job completes, worded roughly like this:

Export was stopped early to avoid exhausting memory; the file contains the first 12,400 row(s). Narrow the view's filter to export the rest.

This is the part to be careful about: the warning is a message on screen, not a note inside the spreadsheet. The file itself looks completely normal — correct headers, correct data, no marker at the bottom saying it was cut short. And message strips fade after a few seconds and are not kept anywhere.

So build the habit:

1. Before exporting, note how many records the list says it matches.
2. After the file arrives, check the row count in the spreadsheet against that number.
3. If it is short, the export was truncated regardless of whether you saw the message.

What to do about it — split the export rather than retry it, because a retry will stop at the same place:

• Add a filter that cuts the set into parts that clearly fit: one month at a time, one region at a time, one status at a time.
• Export each part, then combine the files in your spreadsheet.
• Remove columns you do not actually need before exporting. Fewer columns means less work per row, which means more rows fit inside the ceiling.
• If a full export is a regular need at that size, ask your administrator — there are ways to arrange it that do not go through this button.

More on why large lists behave this way in Large Lists And Performance.

When An Export Fails

A failed job shows as Failed in the Jobs tray, with a red error line under it. The wording of that line is technical and is meant for whoever supports your application.

Work through this in order:

1. Narrow the filter and try again. Most failures are size-related, and a smaller slice usually succeeds.
2. Remove heavy columns. Columns that pull in related records are the expensive ones.
3. Refresh the list and retry once. A transient problem does happen.
4. If it still fails, report it with: the screen you were on, the filter you had applied, roughly how many records the list said it matched, the time, and the red error line copied as written. See When Something Goes Wrong.

If the whole click fails rather than the job — you get an error pop-up instead of the "export started" message — that is the generic request failure, and the same advice applies: fewer records, fewer columns.

If You Cannot See Any Export Entry

Work through the possibilities in this order:

1. You are not on a table layout. Cards, a simple list, boards and calendars have no export menu at all. Switch layout if the screen offers it.
2. Your role has not been granted export. The two export entries are permissions, granted separately, and they are switched off until somebody switches them on. This is the most common cause of an empty three-dots menu.
3. The screen is driven by a hand-written query. Those screens keep the page export but never offer the full export.
4. Your administrator removed or renamed it. Look for a differently named entry before concluding it is gone.

There Is No Import From A Spreadsheet

Worth stating plainly, because people go looking for it: exporting is one-way. There is no "import from spreadsheet" screen, no upload-a-file-of-records button, and no round-trip where you export a list, edit it in Excel and put it back.

If you need to load a batch of records, that is a job for your administrator. They have tools for it, but they are not part of the everyday interface. Ask for it as a data load and be ready to supply your spreadsheet, a description of what each column means, and a decision about what should happen to rows that already exist.

Attaching a spreadsheet as a file to a record is a different thing entirely and works normally — see Uploading Files And Images.

Actions On A Record's Own Screen

The same custom actions can be offered when you have a single record open, in two places:

• An Actions menu at the top right of the record, which also holds the standard entries such as editing, duplicating and deleting.
• A row of wide buttons across the top of the record's fields. This row is empty unless your administrator has deliberately put buttons in it, so many applications never show it at all.

Both act on the record you have open, never on a list. Detail in Record Detail Screens.

Worked Example

Last quarter's invoices for finance.

Finance asks for every invoice issued in the first quarter, with the customer, the issue date, the due date, the net amount and the payment status, as a spreadsheet.

1. Open the invoices list screen.
2. Press refresh so you are working from current data.
3. Filter to the quarter: a condition on the issue date covering January 1 to March 31. If your application also holds draft invoices, add a condition for issued ones only. See Filtering Your Data.
4. Check the record count the list now reports — say it reads 3,180. Write that number down; you are going to compare it with the file.
5. Open the column picker and set the columns to exactly what finance asked for. Remove the ones they did not ask for — internal notes, delivery addresses, anything long. Put them in the order finance wants to read them; the file follows your order.
6. Sort by issue date ascending, so the file arrives in a sensible order.
7. Make sure no rows are checked. A leftover checkbox from earlier would silently reduce the export to those rows.
8. Open the three-dots menu under the list and choose the full export.
9. A message strip confirms the export started and tells you to keep the tab open. A row appears in the Jobs tray. Carry on working elsewhere in the application; do not close the tab.
10. A minute or two later the file downloads by itself and the row reads Ready.
11. Open the file. Check the row count: 3,180 data rows plus one header row. It matches, so nothing was truncated.
12. Send it on.

If step 11 had shown 2,400 rows, the export had stopped early. Rather than retrying it, go back and export January, February and March separately — three files, each comfortably inside the ceiling — then paste them together.

If finance comes back next week asking for the same thing for Q2, save the arrangement as your own view first (filters, columns and sort together), so the whole preparation is one click next quarter. See Saved Views And Queries.

Tips And Gotchas

• Export what you have arranged, not what you have selected — unless you mean to. The full export respects checked rows; the page export ignores them; custom buttons around the list ignore them. When in doubt, clear the checkboxes.
• Always compare the row count. It is the only reliable way to know an export was complete, since a truncated file looks exactly like a whole one.
• Add the column before you export. There is no option in the export itself for "include all fields" — the file contains your displayed columns and nothing else.
• Refresh before exporting. Otherwise you are exporting the state of the data from whenever the page last loaded, which on a screen left open over lunch may be hours old.
• Keep the tab open until the file arrives. Moving around inside the application is fine; closing the tab is not.
• Download today. Finished exports are swept off the server within a couple of hours.
• The Jobs tray is per-browser. Do not go looking on another machine for a file you exported here.
• Message strips vanish. They fade after a few seconds and are not kept anywhere, so a truncation warning or a per-record error can be missed entirely if you looked away.
• The three-dots menu may be empty. That means you have not been granted anything in it, not that the screen is broken.
• There is no print support. Pressing your browser's print command gives you the screen as it is, navigation and all. Export to a spreadsheet and print from there.
• Custom buttons are not previews. They act, immediately, with no undo. Read the section on reading a button before you press it.

What To Ask Your Administrator For

Phrased as ready-made requests:

• "Please grant my role the two export permissions on this screen — I can see the three-dots menu but it is empty."
• "This screen opens on the cards layout and I need to export from it. Can you turn on a table layout I can switch to?" — the export menu only exists on the table layouts.
• "This export keeps stopping early at around N rows. Can it be set up to deliver the full set, or can we agree a way to split it?"
• "Can exports be kept longer than a couple of hours, or delivered by e-mail instead?"
• "We need to load 400 records from a spreadsheet. Can you do a data load for us?" — there is no self-service import.
• "What exactly does the button called X do, and does it act on one record or on everything in my filter?"
• "Please make button X appear only on records where it actually applies" — the usual fix when a button is offered in situations it should not be.
• "Can button X ask me to confirm before it runs?" — possible for some buttons, not all.

See also What To Ask Your Administrator For.

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Related Chapters

• Selecting Records And Bulk Actions
• Saved Views And Queries
• Columns, Grouping, Merging And Calculations
• Notifications And Alerts
• Large Lists And Performance