How to create more than one form in Page designer

Hi Pat,

You are correct — the Page Designer extension only allows one page design per extension. So, you would actually need to install the Page Designer extension multiple times to create multiple different page designs. You can rename each extension installation to help you distinguish between the different apps.

But unfortunately, the big limitation with Airtable is that they only allow a maximum of 10 extensions per base.

And another gigantic limitation with Page Designer is that it cannot be automated in any way… oh, and it also can’t handle multi-page documents, either.

So your best bet would be to turn to 3rd-party solutions if you want to easily & quickly create automated documents from Airtable.

Instead, here are 4 popular solutions for automatically generating documents from Airtable that can do everything that you’re looking to do, and can be fully automated:

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 — which offers hundreds of features that Airtable’s forms don’t offer, such as the ability to 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

Hi Scott,

Thanks for the information. Wow. I think this is a little crazy but am glad you made me aware. I couldn’t believe I couldn’t figure out how to make a second template or form!

Thanks very much, Pat

@Patrick813

You’re welcome!

You may also want to know that there are several other limitations with the Page Designer app as well.

Two of the biggest limitations are:

1. Page Designer can “essentially” only handle single-page documents, and
2. Page Designer cannot be automated in any way at all. You can’t have it automatically create a PDF of a document, you can’t have it automatically generate or print a document, you can’t have it automatically email a document, you can’t have it automatically embed the document into an attachment field, etc.

To workaround all of these limitations, check out the alternative options that I listed in my post above.

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

Thanks again. This is very useful information.
I used to use a workaround to make a “pdf” in Airtable. I would upload the document to Airtable as an attachment, get the image address, insert this an Image in pagedesigner and use this as a “background”, then populate fields on top of this. Overall it worked well.
I made a switch in DB to Ninox and have been using Zapier to send data to Pdffiller.com Which has worked well.
I have the Plus plan in Airtable and since you can now ad Apps (3) to this I thought I’d try again and see what happens. For whatever reason now when I try this I can’t get the attachment I’m inserting as an image/background to not distort when I enlarge it. I’m not shocked but also not sure why it worked before.
Thanks again for your feedback. I really appreciate it. Pat

That's great that you got that working with Zapier and PDFFiller. You may want to also explore Make's automations & integration, which is much cheaper than Zapier yet much more powerful than Zapier.

I do a brief comparison between Make vs. Zapier in this thread.

Make natively supports PDFFiller as well.

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant