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Hi everyone đź‘‹

I’m running into an issue with an Automation setup and was wondering if anyone else has dealt with something similar.

Context:

  • Trigger: Webhook (connected to a form on my website)

  • Action: Google Docs: Create doc

Problem:
Sometimes the automation fails with the following error:

The contents contain unexpected formatting that cannot be converted

It doesn’t happen every time, only occasionally, which makes it hard to debug.

Has anyone experienced this with the Google Docs integration? Could it be related to certain formatting coming through from the form/webhook payload? Or maybe a limitation in how Airtable passes rich text to Google Docs?

Any tips or workarounds would be greatly appreciated 🙏
(I’ll attach a screenshot in the comments as well.)

Thanks in advance!
 

 

​@Vadim_Ciobanu 

Sorry, I have no idea what’s causing that problem. Maybe somebody else will have some ideas for you below.

However, I just wanted to share my standard recommendation which I give to everybody, which is that you might be much better served by doing this with Make’s automations and integrations.

Make’s custom webhooks are infinitely more flexible than Airtable’s webhooks, Make’s automations are infinitely more powerful than Airtable’s automations, and Make is infinitely more customizable & integrable than Airtable’s automations.

For example, Make supports full HTML formatting for any documents that you are trying to create, and can also handle converting markdown to HTML as well. (Airtable’s rich text fields are really markdown fields.)

Check out the screenshot below for how simple your automation would look in Make:

Hope this helps!

If you have a budget and you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with this or anything else that is Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

I have played with using GDocs integrations before and I seem to recall running into a spot or two where RTF components didn’t translate properly (maybe it was creating hyperlinks…? It was a awhile ago). 

Without seeing a comparison of a working example vs a broken one, it’s a bit of a guessing game… Just looking at your screenshot, is it possible that the last name includes accent marks that aren’t supported as a file name? Another thought would be if the date is a datetime string instead of a regular string causing issues but I expect that is similar on working examples.

 

If you could provide examples of text that caused the automation to fail I’d be interested in trying to troubleshoot it!

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