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Hi everyone,


I could use some advice on setting up an automation for a project I'm working on.

I have an Airtable base structured like this:

  • A Rooms table (corridor, toilet, kitchen, etc.)

  • A Products table

  • A Proposal table

  • A Line Items table where I create the Proposal Items which is linked to the other tables.

  • Each product has a payback calculation (e.g., how long it takes to pay for itself)

What I'm trying to achieve is to automate the creation of a graph for each job that:

  1. Plots Rooms on the X-axis and Payback Time on the Y-axis, showing all relevant products linked to that job.

  2. Either:
    a) Automatically generates this graph and uploads it as an image attachment back into the respective Job record in Airtable
    — OR —
    b) Exports the necessary data to another 3rd party tool (e.g., Google Slides, Canva, or similar) to generate the full proposal externally, and then uploads the final proposal document or image back into the Job record.

I'm not sure which approach is more feasible within Airtable's capabilities, I would need to rely on third-party integrations like Make, Zapier, or scripting.

Has anyone tackled something similar?
I'd appreciate any guidance on:

  • Best tools to use

  • Example automations or scripts

Thanks in advance!

Hi Sean, how is everything?

Have you tried the Dashboard interface in the Interface section of Airtable? There you’ll be able to create a Scatter diagram to plot Rooms vs Payback Time.

Additionally, you can show additional information, possibly creating the full proposal within the Airtable interface, for example by adding a table of the Proposal’s Line items with the main information, the total amount of the proposal, etc.)

This would allow you to build the Interface only once and it will give you a poposal report for every job you create within Airtable, simply by choosing the Poposal record with a filter.

You can also simply screenshot the Scatter diagram over to a Google Slides and build your proposal there.

If you could share more details of how your proposal looks like, that could help determine what would be the most efficient tools to use. 

 

If you'd like some Airtable guidance, you can schedule a free meet here. Happy to help!

Matt Nixon

If you know scripting you can try QuickChart (https://quickchart.io/) for it, I used it in conjunction with the ‘Run a Script’ action in an automation to make some risk matrix charts and it worked pretty well!

​@Sean Hyland 

What you want to do isn’t natively possible within Airtable, but you can easily automate that by using Make’s automations and integrations.

Make is a no-code platform that lets you automate Airtable in advanced ways, and lets you integrate Airtable with any app on the web that has an API.

In your case, I would probably recommend using Make’s QuickChart modules, but they offer support for dozens of other charting & graphing apps as well.

Additionally, if you find a charting app that isn’t natively supported by Make, you can use their HTTP module to custom-craft your own API calls.

If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. For example, here is one of the ways that you could instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable. 

I also give live demonstrations of how to use Make in many of my Airtable podcast appearances. For example, in this video, I show how to work with Airtable arrays in Make.

You asked about using Zapier, but I would never recommend Zapier. Make is infinitely more powerful and significantly cheaper than Zapier, as I explain in this thread.

Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

Hey ​@Sean Hyland,

If you get to go down the path of using a third party automation tool as ​@ScottWorld mentioned, you might as well want to give n8n a shot. I’d say it is the most powerful automation/integration tool currently out there, and you can self-host it and pay only around $7/mo.

Regarding the chart aspect of things, Scott (using Make) and Adam’s answers above seem accurate.
 
Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

Hi all,

Thank you for your help and suggestions! I've got n8n, so I'll give it a go with QuickCharts and see how it works out.

Appreciate the support!

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