Create PDF Document from Dynamics 365

Dynamics 365 offers several options to generate documents. This could be for emailing a Quote to a customer OR to print an Order or Invoice.
Most of the time documents needed to be generated in PDF format.

Below are some of the common options available within Dynamics 365 for Document Generation

1. Mail Merge
A good old functionality existing since CRM 2011 which could generate a word document, however is soon set to be retired.
Refer link https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/get-started/whats-new/customer-engagement/important-changes-coming

2. Reports
This was one of the preferred ways to generate documents, however it involved mutiple manual steps for users in order to run the report and to convert it to a document. However creating reports may involve development efforts depending on the complexity of the report, but the advantage here was that reports could output data in multiple formats (Word, Excel, CSV and even PDF)

3. Document Templates
Introduced in CRM 2016, this could generate a word document with a single click and soon became the popular choice for document generation.  However this OOB functionality could only generate documents in Word format.

Other than the above various ISV’s offered their own custom solutions, which could output documents in various formats.

All the above OOB solutions either involved multiple steps from the users end to generate the document OR involved investment on a 3^rd party add-on which could do the same job in a couple of clicks.

In order to address this limitation, Microsoft introduced automatic PDF generation from a Quote record with ver. 9.0.1905.2010 of the Sales App.
Note : The feature is currently available only for UCI.

The feature needs to be enabled in order to be used.

To enable PDF generation via Quote, browse to ‘App Settings’ area within ‘Sales Hub’
Within this area, under ‘Sales Administration’, you should find the ‘PDF Generation’ setting.
Set it to ‘Enabled’
Note : In some CRM instances the location may slightly differ based on the sitemap customization, but it should be located somewhere within the ‘Sales Hub’ app.

Now browse to a quote record and you should find the 2 new buttons (‘Create PDF’ & ‘Email as PDF’) available on the Ribbon

Clicking on the button list down the various documents which can be generated.
The documents listed here are the various Document Templates defined within the system.
Note: When a new Document Template is created is CRM (for Quotes), it would be automatically available under both of these options.

These buttons do exactly what the say.
Create PDF: Automatically creates a PDF document for the selected Document Template and opens it up on the screen.
Email as PDF: Open up a draft Email record with From, To, Subject & Regarding fields auto populated and the PDF document attached. Users would need to manually make are necessary changes to the Email and hit the ‘Send’ button to send the Email.  

At the moment, PDF generation feature seems to be limited only for the Quote entity.
However we hope that this functionality would be gradually extended to other entities in the future releases of CRM.

Additionally exposing PDF document generation capabilities via the CRM SDK would be a dream come true

Update:
The PDF generation capability for additional entities (entities other than Quote) is released with Dynamics 365 Sales (Sales Hub) app version: 9.0.1911.1009

Below are the list of entities which currently support PDF generation.

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