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There has got to be an easy way to fill an Adobe PDF form with an Airtable record.

It honestly sounds simple to me and I can’t find a solution (so I guess it’s not simple LOL).  I should be able to map fields from airtable to the fields on the existing pdf form and press a button to put the airtable data on the pdf form. Done.

 

I’ve been messing with this for days now looking for a simple solution.  Fillout offers a complex solution and I’m struggling to overcome the learning curve.  Fillout forms are max two columns and it just doesn’t look good to me.  I like the way airtable forms look, the the functionality is limited.  For example why doesn’t a button exist to “SUBMIT and email a formatted copy of the data”?

 

Currently, our staff is using an airtble form to enter data into the table.  Works fine.  But thennnn, someone has to physically enter that data from the airtable table into an existing pdf form.  Very time consuming and mistake prone.  Cut and paste or retype 50 fields.  We deal with a ton of different agencies all with their own pdf forms so the challenge is that we MUST use their form.

 

 

You’re correct that you would need to turn to 3rd-party apps if you would like to automate the process of creating PDF files from Airtable.

But you were incorrect about the limitations of Fillout.

You can upload your own custom PDF forms with Fillout (click here for details), and you can map the fields to wherever you want them to appear on the PDF form.

I show how to do that step-by-step on this Airtable podcast episode:

Fillout is 100% free, and it also offers hundreds of other features that Airtable doesn’t offer, such as the ability to update existing Airtable records with a form. 

You can also use any variety of 3rd-party apps to automate the creation of PDF files as well.

One of my favorite ways is to use PDFFiller, which you can automate via Make’s PDFFiller integrations and Make’s Airtable integrations.

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.

(You can also use Make with other apps as well, even good old fashioned Google Docs or Google Sheets… and then Make can automatically convert the document into a PDF file.)

Additionally, here are 2 other ways to automate PDF creation from Airtable:

  1. DocuMint — the original document creation app for Airtable. Creates PDF files. You can also get charts and graphs embedded into your document by using QuickChart.
  1. DocsAutomator — creates Google Docs documents or PDF files. 

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

There has got to be an easy way to fill an Adobe PDF form with an Airtable record...

Currently, our staff is using an airtble form to enter data into the table.  Works fine.  But thennnn, someone has to physically enter that data from the airtable table into an existing pdf form.  Very time consuming and mistake prone.  Cut and paste or retype 50 fields.  We deal with a ton of different agencies all with their own pdf forms so the challenge is that we MUST use their form.

 

 

Ah, but this isn’t really that simple then is it? When we were recommending Fillout on a previous thread, I think we were all under the assumption that you had a single format you were trying to send back to people. What it sounds like though is that you’re doing intake and then wanting to apply that collected data into a variety of different forms. So it’s not “Collect data, turn into PDF” but “Collect data, select which form you want populated, populate a fillable PDF form designed by someone else”

That being the case, Fillout and the PDF airtable creation extensions aren’t the answer. I think ​@ScottWorld’s Make recommendation is the way forward. I don’t personally have experience with PDFFiller, but that or perhaps Pdf.co fit what you’re looking for.

Hey ​@Edward White,

For a breif demo and step by step on how you’d use Airtable<>Fillout to such effect you can take a look at this YouTube video you recorded. To ​@DisraeliGears01’s point, and if I am getting the use case right, if you have multiple Fillout forms (one per PDF that you might need), and you have a formula to dynamically show the specific form(s) that applies to the specific record, then that might be all of what you need.

Alternatively, rather than using pdf.co or other, you might want to first give it a shot using a simple google docs automation using Zapier, Make, or n8n (I would personally suggest n8n -given these reasons). This will be super cheap, and you can easily build the mapping pretty much using just {Curly Brackets} 😃. Again, you would need as many templates as forms you might need to fill, and you should have logic on your automation to decide which form(s) apply.

Hope this brings some more light to the discussion.

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

Hello ​@Edward White,

 

You could try using Plumsail Documents. It integrates with Airtable, so you can create a PDF from a template with a button click or automate document creation when a new record is created.

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