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Introducing Document Automator

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Scott_White
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

:wave: Hello! I’m Scott – a product manager at Airtable who worked on the development of document automator – the newest way to get Airtable data into formatted documents.

What is document automator?

Available to those on Pro and Enterprise plans, Document automator is a new integration with Google Docs and associated automation action that enables you to export formatted Airtable data directly into Google docs, where you can format and collaborate on that data to your heart’s content.

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Furthermore, because document automator is built into automations, you can use other automations like Slack or Email to automatically share the created document with others, fully automating the process of creating and distributing published reports or status updates.

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How can I use document automator?

Document automator is perfect for creating point-in-time reports or status updates that can be shared with people who don’t have access to Airtable, when you want to editorialize around the data, or when you want to facilitate feedback and discussion about the data. Common use-cases for document automator include:

  • OKR (objectives and key responsibilities) updates
  • Roadmap updates
  • Campaign performance reports
  • Publishing Retrospectives

What about Interface Designer or Page Designer?

While similar, Interface Designer and Page Designer are meant to accomplish different use cases:

  • Document automator: Point-in-time reports/status updates leveraging Airtable data across multiple records, meant to be communicated to audiences that may/may not live in Airtable (or be close to the work), allowing broad access (ie. Google docs) across the org. This helps with distribution and permissioning issues, as well as facilitating comments and discussions directly on the report.
  • Interface Designer: Live-refreshing dashboards or surfaces for collaboration on live data
  • Page Designer: Visual assets (physical printed page design, mock-ups) based on individual records (like a real estate brief, business card, etc.)

Where can I learn more?

To learn more about how to use document automator, check out the launch blog post, or help center article.

I’ll also be hosting a Community AMA to talk all things content automator on June 29, at 9 am PT where you’ll have the opportunity to see the feature in action and ask any questions you may have. You can register now here, and I can’t wait to see you online.

We can’t wait to see what you create with the document automator and would love to hear your thoughts below.

If you are on a pro or enterprise plan and not seeing these changes reflected in your workspace, try clearing your cache.

63 Comments
Karlstens
11 - Venus
11 - Venus

Hey, this is great! Thanks for making the footer optional too. :smiling_face_with_sunglasses:

Question:
Whilst configuring the Airtable Automation, I noticed that we can update either the Title or the Content “Field” in Google Doc. Please excuse my ignorance (as I actually dropped out of Google Docs school when I discovered Airtable 6 years ago :grinning_face_with_sweat: ) , but how do we further define custom fields within the target Google Doc?

For example, I have half-a-dozen record fields that I’d like to send to fill in various words on the target google doc. Take a simple custom Title for example… how do we define the text in Google Doc so Airtable Automation picks it up as a field?

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I see that one Action can cater for as many “Fields” as needed, excellent! Just hoping we can define our own custom fields in the target doc, then this may just be ready for production. :partying_face:

EDIT: Further to my earlier post - can Airtable somehow keep the Google Authentication open when grabing the document URL as a PDF to capture in an Airtable Attachment field, using the suffix /export?format=pdf as mentioned previously in this thread?

@ScottWorld mentioned that this trick works only for a document that’s saved in a publicly accessible folder. But to me, I’m thinking that as we’ve already authenticated Airtable to write to the file, we should be able to capture that updated URL as a PDF and save into our attachments without the need to publicly expose the doc.

Hendrik_Yang
9 - Sun
9 - Sun

It’s awesome! Thank you for this update.

ScottWorld
18 - Pluto
18 - Pluto

Yeah, this isn’t a very useful update if documents can’t be dynamically selected. It isn’t helpful for Airtable to force customers to hard-code a static document name into the system (or choose from a hard-coded list of record names, as announced last week by Airtable).

@Ayesha_Bose Both of the releases that you have announced in the last week do not give users the ability to make custom selections, which limits our ability to customize the product. It would be great to hear your explanations for these very strange, very limiting decisions.