Hello Phillip.

The functionalities of table tools comes from a 3rd party library, and it's somewhat limited.

With the report builder you get to choose which columns will be included in the report, and it would export all visible rows for server-side tables (much like table tools' export functions).

The main advantage of the add-on is the possibility to style the template and export only selected columns.

Yes, Phillip, that's correct.

You also have an option during Report creation - Follow table filtering – this checkbox is visible only if you did choose a wpDataTable data source on previous step. If this is checked, the report will always contain only the rows that are currently visible in the wpDataTable when it’s placed on the same page, in the same order. So if a table is sorted, filtered, etc., the rows will be used in the report same as they appear on the page. If this checkbox is unchecked, or if the wpDataTable isn’t present on the same page with Report controls, whole table will be used in report every time. Important notice: if the table has more rows that are currently visible, the invisible ones won’t be used in the report if the follow table filtering – to use them you would need to select “All” in wpDataTables “Show … rows” dropdown on the front-end.

When you're creating a template, you're adding each column's original header (the header that's saved in the database, not the display header you can set in column settings), so only those columns will be generated.

If you have 50 columns, and your template consists of only 10 columns; even if you display all of them on front-end, only those 10 will be plotted on the report, since you manually added their variables in the template.