Sometimes it’s the little things that make the biggest difference. One of the simplest but most requested features is the ability to export rules and objects out of our system into CSV format for use in spreadsheets.
Spreadsheets are the universal tool in the business world. They are used for financial models, sales lead lists, task management, employee lists, asset management, resource planning, quotes, orders, simple databases, data analysis and more. They are even used to track firewall rules and firewall changes in companies that haven’t yet bought a firewall management solution like Security Manager.
Spreadsheets are simply a ubiquitous business tool. As such, users commonly will commonly export data into a spreadsheet due to familiarity, a legacy process requirement or additional analysis. Because of this, we have made much of our data available to export into a spreadsheet format.
In Version 8, we have made this capability easier to access, moving it right on the list views where you can not only export the entire list, but also search and filter the list and export the filtered result set.
On many of our list pages, we have exposed an Export button allowing a user to export the data in the list to a CSV format. In some cases, we offer a couple of options such as Expanded or Collapsed. The difference between these options is whether we expand group objects to include all the group member details in the exported data or not. This feature is available for Security Rule, Network Objects and Service Objects. More lists will likely be supported with Export in future releases, particularly if there is demand for it.
Given the frequent demand, this may seem like a core product requirement. But many of our competitors fail to offer exporting to CSV and none offer the filtered export option.
