Creating Google Sheet from template and pre-filling fields from Airtable

[Nick_Polanosky]

Hey all,

I am trying to generate some inspection sheets for my manufacturing business automatically. I have a google sheets template that works and all of my job information in airtable. Instead of manually making a new spreadsheet from the template and entering the job information manually, I’d like to automate this.

I have Zapier and On2Air (Both actions and Forms) available if that helps.

I managed to make it work earlier with Formstack/Webmerge but frankly their pricing is far too high for what I’m trying to do. I’d be paying a ton for a bunch of features I wouldn’t be using. Zapier should be able to do it alone from what I see, except for one flaw.

So in Zapier you can make a google doc and have it fill forms automatically (for example, {your_field} will populate from Airtable) but this particular option is nonexistent in the google sheets side of Zapier.

As a result, I looked at embedding a google sheet into a doc, but that doesn’t quite do the job for a few reasons. I’ve also played with page designer, but while I have it working great for one of the documents I need to make it isn’t going to work for a fillable inspection sheet (that has it’s own conditional formatting and variable number of lines and stuff).

Does anyone have any suggestions?

[openside]

Hi @Nick_Polanosky - the approach you would want to take is to create a new sheet in your Google Sheet with the first row being a list of Option Names. Then use the Insert new Row zapier action to perform a single update across that sheet of Options.

Then, throughout the rest of your sheets, you would add a reference to the respective Options Sheet with the values you inserted. Its a little round about way to do it, but works well.

[Nick_Polanosky]

Interesting! I will have to give that a shot!