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Hello, I want to front load that I am annoyed and have been frustratingly trying to brute force this for two weeks with no luck. This is meant to be read with a neutral tone of voice.

My issue:

I operate a small nonprofit and have hit a brick wall trying to get airtable to work for what we need it to do. We have a beautiful form that we created, information populates great, but printing the completed form is impossible. I’ve tried creating it with the design tool, but that doesn’t work at all (it’s broken, we can’t even create something to test it), and we can’t afford to pay yet another company hundreds of dollars to do this for a platform that should have it built in.

I’m surprised and rather irritated that this simple thing isn’t included in the pricetag for airtable… I have a staff of 5 and a minuscule budget. I can’t afford to pay multiple organizations to do something that we were told was built in. This is literally the only reason we went with airtable over other platforms, and now I am stuck manually putting information on the form and paying a company to hold the information like a glorified excel spreadsheet.

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---Edited to add---

My question:

How do we print the completed form that includes all of our checkboxes and all language on the form? I need to to look exactly like it does on our website in order to remain complaint with the grant funding we have. (that’s why I built it the way I did)

Hey ​@Lavenderwise,

Sorry to hear about your experience. 

By “design tool” do you mean Page Designer extension? If not, I’d suggest you take a look at it. If yes, may I ask what is not working with it?

I could recommend you build out an interface and allow for printing of such interface, but in my experience this does not look nice.

To be honest, I would suggest you build out a Fillout form (check out some of the difference between Airtable native forms and Fillout forms here). You do not need to pay anything, as the free tier is super generous. Reason why I am suggesting Fillout is because it includes a pretty robust PDF integration. You can create a template PDF, and then map to it answers from the form.

Hope this helps (I think it will!)

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

​@Lavenderwise 

It sounds like you’re trying to create a PDF version of the data that has been typed into a form, so you can then print out that PDF form or email that PDF form?

You can’t really create truly printable documents from Airtable, although you might have some luck with Airtable Page Designer Extension.

However, the big problems with Page Designer are:

  1. Page Designer can’t be automated at all.
  2. Page Designer can’t handle multi-page documents very well.
  3. Page Designer doesn’t work from interfaces.

So, in my personal opinion, your best for doing what you’re looking to do is to use Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable.

And you won’t have to pay any more money for this, because Fillout is 100% free.

You would simply upload a blank PDF file to Fillout and then map your fields to print wherever you want them to print on your PDF file. After the user submits the form, the PDF file will be automatically created for you, and then you can email it, print it, etc. 

I demonstrate step-by-step how to use this technique on this Airtable podcast episode:

(You won’t need to worry about the eSignature part of my demonstration, because you’re not looking to do eSigning. But the rest of my demonstration will apply to you.)

Note that if you have even more advanced document printing & PDF printing needs, you may need to upgrade to Documint, which will cost you money. Documint is the original PDF creation tool for Airtable!

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

Just seeing ​@Mike_AutomaticN’s reply above right now! Great minds think alike! 😇

​@Mike_AutomaticN , ​@ScottWorld 

The page designer is not working, it won’t allow me to create a template. It wants me to create the form each time I want to print the form. That’s way to much work for something we’re spending hundreds of dollars on… 

So, in my personal opinion, your best for doing what you’re looking to do is to use Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable.

​@ScottWorld  and ​@Mike_AutomaticN 

Thank you both, I will give this a shot!

 

Hi ​@Lavenderwise,

Page Designer isn’t very powerful (which is why I always recommend Fillout and Documint to everyone), but Page Designer actually IS designed to let you create a template that you reuse over and over again. You don’t need to create the form each time.

This YouTube video might help you understand Page Designer a bit more: 
 

 

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

Thanks ​@ScottWorld!!

​@Lavenderwise I’m pretty sure you’ll find your way around using Fillout, but just let us know if you have any other question whilst working on their PDF integration!

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation 

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