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Hello,

We are a large sales organization using the Airtable Page Designer to create PDFs in order visualize data from our commission tables. We have created the PDFs in the Airtable Page Designer, but do not know how to attach them back to the individual record within the table.

For example: we have commission data generated from the table for the entire sales organization. We would like the PDF that was created for Bob Smith, to automatically pull back into Bob Smith’s record. We plan on emailing all of these PDFs to each individual rep through an automation.

TLDR: How do we attach the PDF to the individual rep (record) from which the information was pulled.

​@John_MPC 

There is no way to automate Page Designer (nor any other extensions in Airtable). You would need to manually save the PDF to your desktop, and then manually attach it to the record in Airtable.

Here is the full list of limitations with Page Designer:

  • Page Designer can’t be automated in any way.
  • Page Designer can’t create PDF files on its own — you need to use your computer’s print or PDF functions for that.
  • Page Designer doesn’t yet work in interfaces (but maybe it will at some point in 2025 or 2026).
  • Page Designer can’t insert documents into attachment fields. You have to do this manually.
  • Page Designer can’t effectively create documents that are more than 1 page in length.

If you want to automate the process of creating a PDF file and automatically attach the PDF file to the record in Airtable, or if you want to generate multi-page PDF files from Airtable, or if you want to generate PDF files from interfaces, you would need to turn to a 3rd-party app for that.

Here are a few popular 3rd-party apps for automatically generating PDF documents from Airtable:

  1. DocuMint — the original document creation app for Airtable. Creates PDF files.
  1. DocsAutomator — creates Google Docs documents or PDF files. 
  1. 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.
     
  2. 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

That’s not possible at this time I’m afraid.  The only way you’re going to be able to automatically attach PDFs to your record is if you also automate the generation of the PDFs as well

I like DocsAutomator for this; there are a whole bunch of PDF tools that integrate with Airtable so if you don’t like it a bit of googling will sort you out

https://www.docsautomator.co/

Thanks for mentioning ​@TheTimeSavingCo ​@ScottWorld !

 

​@John_MPC: I’m the founder of DocsAutomator. Happy to help if needed :)

Hey ​@John_MPC,

As mentioned above, that is not possible! My personal favorite is to create an Airtable<>Google Docs automation to create a document out of a template, and then download it as pdf. To such effect you would include placeholders in the google doc template e.g. {First Name} {Last Name} etc, which you would then map via Zapier, Make, or n8n (more on these automation tools here).

If you do not need this 100% automated, but still better than page designer, then I would suggest using Scott’s approach above and use Fillout to generate the PDF. Fillout forms can pre-fetch the data from your corresponding record, and push it to the pdf upon submission. Given their integration with Airtable, this PDF will get uploaded on the corresponding field.

You can find a similar use case on the video below.
 


For last, I did not build this yet but I’d love to give it a shot:
1. Create Fillout form
2. Create PDF “integration”
3. Map it to Airtable
4. Create automation in Airtable that will trigger an api call to Fillout which will submit the form.
If that works, I guess the auto generation of the document should work as well. 

I’ll be playing around with the above in the next few days!

Hope this provides some more context.

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation 
YouTube Channel

Hello ​@John_MPC, 

You can test Plumsail Documents extension. It will create a PDF from template using the Airtable record data and the resulted file can be attached back to record and/or emailed.

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