Force 5 Marine Survey Report Software

Customer can't open the Force5 report PDF you emailed them. Mailed to Gmail.com

Force5 News

Hello all, I hope this finds you all safe and healthy during this COVID pandemic.

In the last couple of weeks, we have received a few support calls concerning PDF surveys that were sent to the surveyor’s customer, only to hear that the customer could not open them because it is asking for a password to view the PDF.

After a lot of research and testing we found that this appears to be only happing with Gmail customers and it seems that the customer is trying to open the PDF while the PDF is still in the email on the cloud.  A quick fix is to tell the customer to download the email to their computer and it will open the PDF attachment to their computer, instead of trying to open it online.

However all that said we cannot control what Google does on it’s email websites but it appears that they are trying to combat malware by making sure that their mail users are carful about what they are opening if a email seems suspicious.

So, to make this as seamless to you, our Force5 customer, we have made a change to our PDF printing configuration and the Gmail thing is fixed in the version on our website now.  So, go to > Help menu > “Check for an update” and update to version 89E29 it has been altered to let your PDF be opened on Gmail without the error messages.

However, I still suggest that your customers are better off downloading the Survey Report and saving it on their computer in case something happens to the Gmail account or their email.  FYI you can always add password protection to your PDF survey report files in one of the following two ways.

  • by going into the Force5 > “Survey file management” module and choose “Convert survey to PDF” there and you have the option to password protect it if you choose.

 or

  • with a survey loaded, click on the printer icon on the left . From the “Print Full Size Report” window, on the bottom right there is an area to enter a password.

With either of these options you will also have the ability to block printing or copying text from the survey. If you have any problems with this, or anything else please feel free to give us a call in the office.

Thank you for your continued business, stay safe and healthy,

Ted Stevens and Force5 Staff

 

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