Print a form

Hey ​@Edward White,

If you’d like to generate, send (and allow for printing) on an actual great looking pdf then I would encourage you take a look at Fillout. Within their free plan they allow for (i) direct integration with airtable, and (ii) PDF generation.

You would upload the template PDF on the integrations tab, and you would map the actual answers. You might want to check the video below.
 

I’d be happy to show you around if needed. Feel free to grab a slot.

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation 

​@Edward White 

As ​@Mike_AutomaticN mentioned above, this can be done very easily with Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable.

Check out my video podcast at this link to see how to automatically generate PDFs from form submissions: Using Fillout to create an eSignature approval process with PDF file creation.

FYI: Fillout is 100% free, and it offers hundreds of features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to update Airtable records using a form, display Airtable lookup fields on forms, control access to a form via SSO or email domains, perform math or other live calculations on your forms, accept payments on forms, collect signatures on a form, create multi-page forms with conditional paths, create new linked records on a form, connect a single form to dozens of external apps simultaneously, add CAPTCHAs to your form, and much more.

I also show off more advanced features of Fillout on this Airtable podcast episode: Using Fillout to create an order entry form with line items.

Additionally, if you need to create PDFs in Airtable that aren’t generated from form submissions, 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. (AS PREVIOUSLY MENTIONED ABOVE: Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable can generate PDF files from form submissions.)

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

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

If the “Allow printing” option is enabled, users should be able to see the “Print this page” option.

You could try opening the shared form link in an incognito window to check if the option appears for you.

It may also help to have the users try opening the form link in a different browser to see if that resolves the issue.

Keep us posted on how it goes.

Taha, Views And Bases
 

Hm if you’re talking about printing the form itself, toggling on ‘Allow printing’ allows base users to print out the form, but logged in users who don’t have access to the base and non-logged in users can’t see the three dots like you said

If you’re talking about printing the submission results of the form, then perhaps a quick workaround might be to email the results of the submission to them via an automation?  Might have the same issue with it looking horrible since it’s still printing from the browser, but it being from a different site might make it better

If that doesn’t work, your best bet’s going to be Fillout which lets you auto-generate PDFs on form submit.  If you don’t want to use a new form software you could try generating PDFs with the results via a third party tool like DocsAutomator or something and just use the native Airtable forms

Thank you ​@TheTimeSavingCo.  We make our customers create an airtable account so we can see who is using the form but when they access the form, no three dots. Why would they limit that functionality??   Forms should have a print button on the bottom next to the Submit button!  

Very very frustrating!!!

I’m going to check out Fillout but I just don’t have the time to lean ANOTHER application.

It really is crazy that Airtable doesn’t have this available.  I need our customers to fill out this form and it works great.  It adds data to our database exactly what I want BUT why would airtable remove the printing ability for a user without access to our base?  I don’t want outside users to have access!  Just fill out the form and print it!  Sounds easy to me!!

Part of the issue is that until they hit submit on the webform, their details aren’t actually captured in Airtable. Really forms are just a way of filling in all the record details at once, rather than one at a time. Airtable doesn’t have the information to put into a printable format until after the information is submitted.

Fillout honestly is going to mostly operate the same way I think, though it's better about capturing half completed forms. For a printable version though I think they’re going to still have to submit and then in the “Thanks for submitting” splash page you can add a download PDF option. Fillout is totally worth learning though and extremely intuitive.

The way many folks implement this though is instead of a print button where submit is, they send an auto-response email that the user can print out if desired. You can do this natively in Airtable or using other automation tools, and it can have their submitted details listed in the email. Another option is to use the page designer extension (or another PDF generator) to generate a formatted PDF of their submission, attach it to the record, and then send an auto-response email with the PDF as an attachment (which the user can print at their leisure). 

Hey,

Regarding Page Designer -Airtable extension mentioned by ​@DisraeliGears01, its biggest limitation is that you cannot automate the downloading/printing of the pdf. That needs to be done manually one record at a time. In that sense, Fillout would help a lot and it is honestly a very simple solution which will not require much learning.

If you do not need an actual PDF but just the response, then the automatic email with mapped answers -also mentioned by ​@DisraeliGears01- is the leanest and best solution I would go with. Let us know if you need any help setting this automation :D

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

Btw this is a step by step on how to use the Fillout and Airtable for generating PDFs. You’ll see that it took me only a couple of minutes to get it connected :D

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation 

Ah just to be clear, I don’t think Fillout lets users print out their responses prior to submission either, the idea is to that Fillout generates a PDF and you’d have an automation to send it to them via email, and then they’d print that out

You may have better luck with their browser printing layout though

If you’re sending them the PDF anyway, I reckon you may as well try sending them the form results via an automation to see if prints alright, or if you’re using the old forms view you can toggle on ‘allow people to request a copy’: