Customizing my invoice is not yielding the same results that I see on screen!

You may be able to click on the table in layout designer and move the column dividers and get it to work.  Click once to select the table.  Then click on the column dividers and move them.   Then print from within QuickBooks and see what you get.  Lather rinse repeat until you get it lining up.  

If that doesn't work...  It looks like you have your column positions (dividers and column headers) as part of the background graphic).   I don't know why it isn't lining up but I'm not sure I'd do it that way given the problem you are having (if that is indeed what you are doing).

I'd try just bringing in graphic pieces for the individual elements that can't be created in the layout designer.   Before doing that, I'd create the table and fields using Layout Designer.  For the headings I'd label them in Layout Designer and just get the fonts and colors like you want them.

If you keep messing with it you should be able to get it.   It almost looks like the graphics are getting scaled somehow - you may want to put them in individual pieces and try using PDFs instead of whatever format you are using, which doesn't look like it is scaling identically when printed.

Its kind of hard to say without having the file.

Layout Designer in QuickBooks isn't going to be anywhere near as slick as something like Illustrator obviously.   We hope to improve it in the future but it will never be competitive at that level (Adobe probably has 30 engineers working full time on Illustrator and has for two decades).

Beautiful design and all of your points seem totally valid to me, Lindsay.  I don't see you trying to do anything unreasonable, and I hope that Intuit will fix all of the issues that you raise.

Two workarounds that have been helpful for me in other design software - that I  imagine you're aware of given your graphic talent:

1.  It sounds like the layout designer elements have 'margin' effects that cause text to be pushed around when they are present vs when they are absent (for your preprinted form).  If Layout Designer supports a 'stacking order', perhaps sending them all to the back will help.

2.  If not, the trick that has helped me in other software is to use white ink. ;-)  Use white and white background (if necessary) for your text.  It won't print, but the elements still being there might keep all of your alignment according to the original design?  By having the text still present (but in white), the totally bogus issue of column heading text disappearing in the Invoice screen should be fixed too?

Yes, white on white will work as you suggest, Dr. Karl.  And honestly I don't know why the columns are not lining up with the graphic, either.  I've done pretty much what Lindsey is trying to do successfully many times.  So there's something subtly different that is failing.   I suggested another approach as I think you can get the same desired results and it may avoid scaling issues.

What format are the graphic files in? 

Dr Karl's suggestion about the margin makes me wonder if the issue might not be in the page set up of the form.   That might cause some scaling and is something I haven't tried in Layout Designer much myself.   In Layout Designer choose Page Setup and make sure it is set for US Letter with a scale of 100%.  Then choose Print and make sure that too is set to US Letter with a scale of 100% and that the layout is vertical.

I don't know if that is required - it shouldn't be - but I'm just curious as to what is "different" from what I've done in the past that is causing this issue.

I am creating the graphic files in Illustrator using the EXACT size artboard as a sheet of paper (8.5x11) and I triple checked that the document setup in the customizer was set to letter sized paper (8.5x11).

After I finish in illustrator I take it into photoshop and flatted and save as a high quality jpg to use as a background image for the invoice.

I wonder if there is some bug with the way photoshop is saving the jpg, or some bug with the layout customizer thing.

Oh.. and DrKarl, thanks for the kind words on the design!! I feel like it still needs some work, but overall I am happy with it. I have a few changes that I want to make, maybe If i EVER get this thing right, I will post a new version

I never even THOUGHT about the white ink. Well, i thought about it but my headers are BLACK with white text underneath them.. If use black text over the white text under will have the letters show through, unfortunately.

Aside from my total and complete frustration with the UI of this application, the other thing that has be scratching my head is the fact that the guides aren't stuck on the top layer!! Those blue lines that show you the average bleed are on the lowest layer.. So when I put my all over graphic background, it covers the guides so I can't see them!!!

I thought maybe it was a problem with my image being out of line and not being exactly centered in the document, but would could tell when the guides disappear! I mean, I don't have any anticipations of the layout designer being like illustrator or inDesign.. but COME ON!! Has no one that created this ever even designed anything?

A few things I would request

Better handling of fonts and text attributes

ZOOM IN!! (why is that not there?)

Placable and movable guides paired with the fixed document guides 

Easier selection of the text boxes

Ability to remove a header from the printed document without removing it from the screen view

(i'm sure i'd have more if i worked with it harder)

 I mean, GIMP is a completely free program.. they can create a pretty kick ass application for designing.. Quickbooks could definitely do better.

so yea, in the mean time I am going to continue to play with this thing to get it to where it prints normally. I might just go ahead and guy preprinted invoices from my printer and just create a blank template.

 :-))))  Sorry to be smiling / laughing at your response ... but I like your attitude, Lindsay!  You clearly know what you're doing and are not able to accomplish your goal here.  I think you have some really good ideas for the QB team there ... particularly putting the guide lines on the top layer.  (It has always been on the bottom, even in Windows as I recall.  Yours is the first case I've heard of a complete 100% underlay.  When someone is just dragging small elements around, it doesn't matter that they cover up the grid that much.)

Anyway...

I believe your problem (or Intuit's - whatever) - is that your Illustrator artboard was set up as exactly 8.5 x 11.  If you were doing a PDF of that, and printed it on a printer that did not support borderless printing, it would print properly if you set Acrobat to scale at 100% and to center the document. (The edges will be truncated/cropped according to the physical margins.)  If you take it and in Acrobat say 'shrink to fit' - you'll probably see it change to 93% or something weird - because Acrobat will take the physical margins of the print device into account.

QuickBooks does not give you margin control.  That is set up in the OS X print dialog.  Because of a topic here in the last few days about margins.... and my own experience getting 24" x 36" layouts to print on a large format printer...  I think the shifting you are seeing is because Quickbooks "thinks" your 8.5 x 11 graphic is too big for the usable layout area.

The blue guidelines in Layout Designer are the margins for the currently selected paper.  Your artwork must fit inside those guidelines.  To get what you want (I think), create a borderless 8.5 x 11 custom paper size via File > Page Setup  and 'Custom" from the Paper Size drop-down list.

See this screenshot - I've created a custom "Borderless letter" size - and you'll notice that the blue margin guidlines are now at all edges of the Invoice form.

I'm just guessing that THIS is why your full-size underlay image got shifted.. ??

PS I totally hate this method of controling margins... accustomed to app control in the pro apps that i use...but they might be using the old Mac Carbon stuff... and maybe this is our 'future'. :-(

 My experience with layout designer lends me to believe that it's the most terrible program I've I've ever encountered outside of free shareware. You would think a graphics program would actually include support for imported graphics. No such luck with layout designer. I tried to import my B&W logo as a high-quality PDF or EPS. No dice. It would pixelate the edges and ruin it when printing. BMP? No. TIF? No. JPG? No.  All of them came out terrible. AND its not just the Mac version, either. The Windows version of layout designer is EQUALLY terrible.

In the end, I had to hack into a font file and inserted my logo as a typeface character. Intuit needs to go back to the drawing board on this one.

SCCI I completely and whole heartedly agree that this is WORSE than shareware. Like i said, GIMP is a perfectly fine program and although I don't expect it to be that intense, the quality for what it SHOULD do should be there.

I have tackled the pixelated image issue.. If you export from Illustrator "for web" which is the only way to save as a .png or .jpg, you end up with very low quality images at about 200 dpi. If you open your newly finished image (.ai file) in photoshop, then you click SAVE AS and save it as a super high quality image at 300dpi, you have a MUCH MUCH more crisp picture. I didn't realize this because generally if i work with .jpg it's for web use, and 200 dpi is ok.. but my husband works with photoshop because he's a photographer and he knows all these little tricks. Photoshop gives you the option to heighten the resolution on save whereas illustrator just makes it as low dpi as possible for web use.

ANYWAYS..i think i figured out the issue.. it did have to do with the margins in layout editor. The image was being scaled automatically to fit INSIDE the margins.. THANKS FOR GIVING ME THE OPTION QB!!! and it went all wacky from there.

What I don't understand is.. If it is being resized,, if i view the document with the all screwy graphic, i should see it as a print preview. That means that if I move the boxes of text over the area that I see them in on the layout designer preview, they should still line up!!!! They would just not be exactly where i want them on the page.. Does this make sense??

So even though the background image is pushed over 50px from the right, I can see this and move my "date" box at the top over the date box on the background  and it should be all set.. The printed page will still show outrageously wrong margins, but the boxes should still overlap where i wanted them to within the actual graphic.

THAT is what had me completely and entirely spinning my gears here.

Thanks for the feedback on Layout Designer.  We are aware of its limitations - it is just a resources problem.   We'll improve it when we get time to focus on it again.  

Side comment: When my hubby and I had our design firm, we tried to create "custom" forms for a client who used American Contractor, a sort of legacy accounting system that uses (as I recall) either FoxPro or Crystal Reports for creating invoices and such. That was such a frustrating (and ultimately unsuccessful) experience, that Layout Designer (which I speculate is more akin to Crystal Reports than to Illustrator or Indesign) seems like amazing, easy-to-use software to me.

huh?? are you saying that the layout designer seems easy to use?? Or that its so dumbed down that it can't be that hard to figure out? I'm confused.

here is NO intuitive interface. Minimally, they should are designed it closer to the FCK editors that you see on the web.. They could have made it by copyting Microsoft Word (which is what most designer programs do) but instead they went with a hybrid of a sad attempt at making it close to inDesign/Illustrator and some. Something that should be easy.. like font size/selection isn't even close to standard

We actually fought with a UI design expert quite a bit over it.  What is easy for one person isn't necessarily easy for another.   There's quite a lot of variety in the user base.  You happen to be on the high end of the layout scale - along with a lot of other designers.  But we have a lot of users who are selling parts or something, too.

However the primary limitation is engineering and QA time and making it work with the existing code in the rest of the program, which was non trivial.   Its worlds better than what was there before.   I've worked on commercial graphics programs (both paint and illustration) before.   We had nowhere near the time and staff on this that we put into even "simple" things like text manipulation on those programs.

If we took a full cycle and put our full team on it you would have a very nice layout designer. But the layout designer is really a very small percentage of what this program does.  Its probably less than 2% of the total code - if that.

We'll put more resources into it when we can. Graphics programs are actually a lot more fun to write than accounting software.   But a lot of other things are highly desired by users and its always a game of trying to pick the ones that are most important for the most people.  

Hey - at least we didn't name it FCK.

Fighting with a UI expert is not a smart thing.. and it shows. I have done plenty of research in the field of UI and while I might be a "higher end user" doesn't mean that I dont know what would work for everyone. I design plenty of user interfaces that are made for a massive span of types of users.

I'm not saying it had to be on the top, but to go against a UI expert that was helping you to make it more user friendly?

My frustration is the fact that i AM a design professional and I can't figure out most of the crap on there! If it takes me that long to figure out that my image was resized, then what about the average user?! Chances are they just don't use it because they tried and failed and never said anything

Go back to the UI professional and don't fight him on it next time. Just my .02

Oh.. and my guess is that about 80% of the FOR MAC users are design professionals and would prefer to have a design editor (or easier working in with a design document) than inventory control.

Lindsay, I was making a comparison to another accounting program's customization system, which was 100 times more difficult and finicky than Layout Designer. I don't compare LD to Illustrator or Indesign, because those programs create "independent" files that (usually) don't have to interact with a lead (my terminology) software application, as LD does with QB.

Just my take on things—not that I wouldn't like to see improvements in Layout Designer!

I'm in the construction industry, but I use a Mac, as I'm sure many of the Mac users in here will attest, because we don't like using crap. A Windows PC is crap. So is the majority of the software that runs on it. I'm forced to use both more times than I care to, so I know. I've also used the gamut of Mac design software, and Layout Designer doesn't even come close to being a shareware-level of quality. And you know what? That wouldn't even matter to me as long as what I put in is what yI got out, no matter how hard I had to fight it with element positioning. 

Buuuut, for your company to tout custom invoice designing as a selling point is pretty disingenuous, considering the program can't handle the proper output of ANY graphic formats. What EXACTLY is the primary use of a graphics program in the first place? For pete's sake, you don't attempt to sell an accounting program that doesn't count, do you? 

And worst of all, its a marketing feature. Don't you use tree charts and milestone goals for features? I can imagine there were plenty of pissed off customers who plunked down 300.00-400.00 dollars on an update to this package simply for the promise of this one feature, and your project manager let them down. It does far more damage to your reputation than your fret over "resource allocation" when you send out beta-quality software. You certainly leave your customers sweating what else about the suite they'll discover is "beta" if you can't even get your marketing features right. 

SCCI - THANK YOU.> that is eactly my point!! You prooved my point even further by saying you aren't a design professional but you own a mac and have used some design programs. My guess is if you use a mac, you have used design software because there is a certain type of user who uses a mac. They aren't ALL designers, but they have an eye for quality.. MOST OF THE TIME.

You dont buy a mac for a construction biz just because.. you do because you can see the quality over a PC when it comes to doing certain things, even though it means you will likely need to use two computers (some things are only done on a PC)

Anyways.. teh UI is not even close to something that is usable for the average person, and is just frustrating to the somewhat regular designer.

One of the major selling points for me was the layout designer. As a graphic design professional, it is expected that my invoices match the rest of my identity and not look like a quickbooks printout. This layout designer HARDLY allows that.

I hear you, lindsayanng, and you do not like the QuickBooks Mac layout designer.   And SCCI, I hear you, too.   I'm not going to defend it - I think it could be much better, too.   But I think you should compare it to something more like FileMaker than a graphics program.    

I too would like to spend more resources making layout designer better.   However we have limited resources and many requests and we've been focused on other areas for the last two releases.  We are constantly reminded of the features we don't have - multiuser, online bill pay, progressive invoicing, shipping manager, etc.   These are all very important.  Our product managers pick and choose which ones are most important to the user base.   

There have been improvements in the printing which carry through to making it possible again to improve the layout designer - this was really the work that was done in 2010 to make Layout Designer better.  Unfortunately it was not at the UI level and I'm pretty sure this introduced the  bug in the margins that caused much of your frustration - I'll write up a bug about that. 

Here's one way you can make Layout Design better and will cost you very little money: In the next patch, have it replace'10's Layout Designer with QB 2007's Layout Designer. At least that one worked. Then you'll have fewer upset customers sitting around stewing while you come out with a $300.00 fix for it a year later.

I think you are entirely missing the point. The new and improved AWESOME FEATURE for this upgrade was the layout designer. 

If you dont have the resources because you are still making the STANDARD PROCESSES in an accounting software, then none of us should be paying full price and we all should be considered beta users.

Its great to constantly release updates, but at what point are these updates something a customer should have to pay for? I mean, the fact that there HAS been a mac program since early 200 means that you had a LONG time to catch up the PC version. MANY MANY software companies start building for one platform and then later come out with the EXACT SAME software for the other platform (whether it be PC to mac or mac to PC) and guess what.. these software companies managed to put out software that works close to the same on both!! I mean, they might look different, but its really rare when you have software that is completely missing certain standard features of the software! 

There is nothing more frustrating than purchasing a software upgrade because of a specific feature to not only have that feature be crap, but have it hardly work! 
 

I've completely given up on the layout designer.. I can't get any of it to really print well.. So i am sending my illustrato file to my printer and having them create preprinted invoices.. So the only thing that layout designer will need to do is place the boxes in the right place.. You think that can work ? I would hope so!

For strange reasons, I've been enjoying this dialog immensely - I co-moderate a large (42,000 user) forum that has auto-censoring of all kinds of words (put in place by the manufacturer) ... and so we can only ever guess there as to what users are really saying.  lindsayanng's and SCCI's unvarnished comments thus give me a smile for refreshing honesty... :-)

I agree with you guys ... and there are numerous areas of QB Mac that I feel Intuit should feel a bit embarrassed about ... but we all have to accept a situation that Apple recently imposed on all developers, including Intuit which has drained immense amounts of resources that would otherwise have been used to move products forward...  I believe it has been Biscotti who has mentioned this issue as being a major one with the production of QB 2010 Mac.

All software on the Mac is built using common building blocks.  Apple had two flavors of blocks.  Carbon lets existing applications in a standard programming language continue to run. It supports 32 bit programs and 64 bit support was promised.  When Apple introduced Cocoa, another flavor of building block, they promised developers that they would continue to develop Carbon.  As things moved to 64 bit, Carbon 64 and Cocoa 64 progressed.  Developers counted on Apple honoring their promise to support Carbon.  Then Apple changed the rules and announced abruptly that Carbon 64 was not going to be developed any longer.  Developers were screwed.  All of a sudden they had a short time period to re-write their applications to use Cocoa if they wanted to be 64 bit ... and also to survive in a future that would not even have Carbon any longer.  Switching to Cocoa even required programming parts of their applications in an entirely different programming language.

So, all kinds of software companies like Intuit and Adobe have had to spend mega bucks on rewriting their software because Apple first said one thing and then said another.  (When you Google all of this, there are some that say Apple warned developers very early on.  There are others that quote Apple documents and comments at the developer conference showing that they assured developers that Carbon would stay and originally only 'encouraged' developers to switch to Cocoa.)

Trying to introduce lots of new features during such a re-write could be catastrophic, even if more programmers and money could be thrown at a project.

Should customers  care that Intuit (and other Mac developers) had these problems?

No, actually.  It was a terrible corporate cost and pain ... but the customers really shouldn't care and have no reason to be overly sympathetic.  We expect stable software that is a delight to use and which provides us value for our purchase.  We vote with our dollars.

The transition to Cocoa may have sucked resources - and may still be doing so, but as users we have been dealing with late-beta level software since release - with what has seemed to be the poorest QA I have ever experienced.

Still, having interacted with several Intuit employees here who are all super people, I do sympathize with the jam that they're in.

I don't believe I am missing the point.   Layout Designer is usable for most people.   It ain't great, I'll grant you, but you can layout forms in it.  Obviously it isn't working for you.   I'm trying to capture why, specifically, so that we can fix it.   

Suggestions, writing up bugs for fix (like the margins one), and listening are really the reasons I am on this forum.  I do appreciate your feedback, particularly in helping us determine that the margins are causing scaling problems in the images when printing.   That's a bug and entirely our fault.  I'll do my best to see that it gets corrected.

I gave suggestions near the top of the thread of how I would go about using it to accomplish what you are trying to do. I'd break up the art pieces in to small minimum bounding box PDF files. I'd use the layout designer itself to layout all the columns, fields, and column headers. I've done this many times and it has always worked for me. 

There are several misconceptions in this thread.  I'll point them out here - I have a feeling it won't do any good but I'll try:

1. Layout designer was a new feature in QuickBooks Mac 2007, which came out in 2006.   We haven't upgraded it substantially for 2010.  

2. We did rewrite the print system and that has resulted in more bugs than I'd like.  We have been fixing them and will continue to fix them, for free, in R releases.  The rewrite of the print system will allow for future improvements in Layout Designer.

3. If there's something specific about the QuickBooks Windows layout designer you'd like to see on the Mac side please let me know and I'll make a list. The Windows version isn't much better than the Mac version IMO.  If we ported it completely I doubt you'd find it an improvement.

4. QuickBooks retails for $200.

5. We are add new features every year.  Many of those are accounting features.  The Windows side adds new features every year, too. There is no set list of standard features that we will exhaust.