Word document automation

All of the methods below can be automated from interfaces. No extensions required. (Although coming soon, extensions will be available in interfaces. No official release date yet.)

1. The way that I have setup all of my clients for automating Microsoft Word documents from Airtable is by using Make’s Microsoft Word integrations along with 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.
   
   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.

2. Alternatively, if you’re okay with Google Docs documents instead of Microsoft Word documents, you can turn to Docs Automator, which is easier to learn & setup than Make.
    
3. If you’re okay with creating a PDF file instead of an editable document, then I would checkout one of these apps:
   
   - DocuMint, which is the original document creation app for Airtable.
   
   - Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable, which lets you create or update Airtable records using a form, and which can create custom PDF files when the form is submitted.
   
   I show how to set this up on this Airtable podcast episode:
   Using Fillout to create an eSignature approval process with PDF file creation.

Hope this helps!

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

Hmm, what’re you trying to do exactly?  If you’re looking for something similar to a Word doc but don’t need it to be actually in Word, Airtable has an automation action that lets you create / update a Google Doc: https://support.airtable.com/v1/docs/google-workspace-actions

The idea would be to set up the automation to trigger when you click a button on the Interface, create the Google Doc, and then update the record with a link to the created Doc.  If you’re just looking for the file itself, you can then open the Google Doc and save it as a .docx file if you want?

You could probably also extend this functionality to download the file as a .docx into an attachment field in Airtable too, but you’d need a third party tool like Make, Zapier, n8n etc for that
---

If you want it to create a doc inside Microsoft Word itself, then you’re definitely going to need one of the aforementioned third party tools I’m afraid

Hey ​@rfulda,

Please share some additional details on your use case, so we can provide deeper insights.

In addition to:

- Airtable’s native automation action

- Zapier, Make, n8n, intengrations (more on these tools here)
- Docs Automator, Documint, and Fillout’s PDFs integration 

Do remember that you can also use Airtable’s Page Designer extension to generate PDFs with data from your records.

Once again, this will really depend on whether you need an editable document as final result, or a PDF will do.

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

Unfortunately, Page Designer is not a viable option here because:

• Page Designer can’t be used from interfaces yet, which is one of the key requirements that the original author asked about.
• Page Designer can’t be automated in any way.
• Page Designer can’t handle multi-page documents properly.
• Page Designer doesn’t actually create PDF files… it just lets you print from your computer, and then you have to use your own computer’s PDF tools to create the PDF file.

As I mentioned above, here are a few popular solutions for generating documents from Airtable:

1. DocuMint — the original document creation app for Airtable. Creates PDF files.

2. DocsAutomator — creates Google Docs documents or PDF files. 

3. Make’s integrations — which can be integrated with any document-creation app of your choosing, even something as simple as custom Microsoft Word documents.
   
   If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. For example, here is one way that you can instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable.
    
4. Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable — Fillout lets you automatically generate custom PDF files from a form submission.
   
   I show off this feature on this Airtable podcast episode:

   Using Fillout to create an eSignature approval process with PDF file creation.

Hope this helps!

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

Oh yes, completely aligned with ​@ScottWorld above. Sorry, misread (maybe didn’t read at all?) the original post! My bad!

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

OUR PROBLEM

We want to generate a Word .docx or at least a Google Doc from Airtable fields.

OUR FRUSTRATION

But ( ggrrrr!) Airtable can’t use its Markdown in a Google Doc, and it can’t output its Markdown (or anything) to a text-format file. Very annoying.

• If we can ever get an Airtable field to output to a plain text Markdown file, we can convert it with Pandoc.
• If we can ever get Google Docs to process the Airtable Markdown text, we can just save the Google Doc as Word.

But neither of these are doable right now without elaborate scripting.

OUR SEARCH

I spent several hours testing solutions for this problem. I’m not much  of a coder, but I can use scripting languages.

For me at least, the conclusions were as follows:

• Make is difficult for non-programmers, which means it will be hard for us to debug, and to fix when something breaks.
• Page Designer generates PDFs - not what we want
• Documint is oriented to PDFs - again, not what we want.
• Fillout is oriented to Forms - also not what we want.

OUR SOLUTION

DocsAutomator. It does the job without much fuss, and it’s well priced. I sorta wish I’d tried it six hours ago.

ANOTHER OPTION

If you don’t want to shell out for DocsAutomator, one hacky alternative fix is to:

• use an Airtable formula with SUBSTITUTE to add some needed newline characters on your rich text fields in  new long (non-rich) text fields.
• then use a formula to write everything you need in one new long (non-rich) text field in Markdown syntax
• then present that field in an interface where you can copy-and-paste it into a Markdown .md text document  
• then use the Writage MS Word plugin (writage.com) to import that Markdown document into word and save it as a .docx.

Like I said, hacky, but OK if it’s just you solving your problem. But DocsAutomator is much simpler.