List of records on one page

Hi Beth,

That’s a great question. A lot of Airtable users run into this need, so you’re not alone.

If you’re only pulling one record at a time and want a customized layout with your branding at the top, Page Designer (Airtable’s official extension) can do that. It lets you lay out fields and images the way you want and export a PDF. It’s a bit of setup and does indeed feel clunky to some people, and it’s limited to one record per generated PDF unless you do creative base design to group records together in one PDF. You’ll also have to trigger it manually.

Another native Airtable option is to build an Interface that shows only the fields you want to capture, arranged visually the way you want them. From there, you can use Airtable’s built-in Print function to export that interface view as a PDF. This works well for quick PDFs. The tradeoff is that it does require building out the Interface layer, the printout can be somewhat messy, and it’s an extra step if you’re currently working only in grid or data views.

If your need is to pull multiple records into one PDF, or automate this process, then third-party tools are usually the better fit. Some popular options people use include:

• DocuMint – generates PDFs from Airtable data using templates
• DocsAutomator – connects Airtable to document templates (often via Google Docs) and exports PDFs, good for multi-page documents
• Typeflow – designed specifically to create formatted PDFs from Airtable records

You can find these extensions and more in the Airtable Marketplace.

Welcome to the community, Beth! I hope this helps.

Cheers,
Paris

Hey ​@BethHughes!

As mentioned by ​@pwin25 above, the leanest you can probably go with is using Page Designer.
Other than that you might be interested in checking out Fillout’s PDF Generation integration (their free plan is all you’ll need). Still really lean, and you should be able to achieve what you are looking for!

You can check out how that works on the video below.
 

For last, if you need any help setting either alternatieve up, feel free to grab a slot using this link and I’ll be happy to show you around on a quick call.

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation 
YouTube Channel  

Hi ​@BethHughes ,

Getting multiple records to print on a page (either as a printed document or as a PDF file) is not really possible with any of Airtable’s native tools.

You can “sort of” hack it with Page Designer, but it doesn’t really handle multi-page documents in the way that you would expect, so the results would not be pretty.

Fillout is one of my favorite tools, but it can’t handle what you’re looking to do  

Many people turn to Documint or DocsAutomator or TypeFlow to generate their PDF files, but the limitation with these tools is that all the records that you want to print need to be combined together into a single linked record field from a “master table” where you would be initiating the document creation from.

This is not a terrible limitation — it just requires restructuring your database a bit and setting up an automation in Airtable or Make to handle it for you.

Those tools would probably be the easiest & best way to do it.

A more customizable approach — but would take much more time to learn — would be to completely turn everything over to Make’s integrations & automations — which can be integrated with any document-creation app of your choosing (even something as simple as custom Microsoft Word documents).

Make offers aggregation tools where you can aggregate multiple records together for your final document/PDF file.

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.

But yeah, in general, printing or generating PDF files from Airtable is one of the weakest parts of the product.

If you need a more advanced database app that handles printing and PDF files perfectly — and can do everything you want easily & quickly — I highly recommend FileMaker Pro.

I used to be a certified FileMaker developer for nearly 30 years before becoming a top Airtable consultant, so if you need help finding a FileMaker developer, feel free to reach out to me through my website.

And 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!

Hm, to me the two main things to consider are: 

1. Does the PDF need to be generated automatically (i.e. happens in the background without you needing to do anything and gets automatically uploaded into your base)
2. How many records will each PDF generally hold?

1. Does the PDF need to be generated automatically and then uploaded as an attachment to your base?

If you want it to be done automatically then you pretty much have to use a third party tool I’m afraid.  I like DocsAutomator for this (https://www.docsautomator.co/), they've got a free plan that lets you try everything out for this and then cost $10 a month for 50 PDFs.  

If you’re familiar with coding, you can try PDFMonkey too (https://pdfmonkey.io/) and they give you 20 PDFs a month for free.  Might need to combine it with a third party automation tool like Make or Zapier though

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2. How many records will each PDF generally hold?

If you’re comfortable with doing it manually (i.e. hitting ‘Print page’, then ‘Save as PDF’ and then uploading it to the base if needed), then the next consideration is how many records you want to display

If you’re doing a fairly small number each time, say, <50, then you could try Airtable’s Page Designer, it can really only handle one page and so more records would break your design.  You could potentially do more with a bunch of workarounds too but that might not be worth the trouble

The next possibility would be using Interfaces, but given that you need your branding at the top I wouldn’t recommend this.  I’ve tried going down this road before and couldn’t figure out how to make the branding show up nicely 

In addition to the above comments, another point to be taken into consideration: What fields/data points of each record and shown how (design) you need these records on your pdf? E.g. neither Fillout nor Page designer would allow you to have a NICE gallery view of the linked records. However, if you only need a grid/list, then you will probably want to explore those options deeper.

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation 
YouTube Channel

​@Mike_AutomaticN The problem with Fillout is that it cannot have a dynamic amount of pages, nor can it have dynamic field sizing. Anything that you want to appear has to be hardcoded on a preset number of pages with predefined field sizes. So it can’t really be used to create multipage documents that have variable lengths. It would be best for filling out a predefined PDF form, for example.

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant