New: Print Interfaces pages or save them as a PDF

[Ayesha_Bose]

Hello! I’m Ayesha, a Product Manager here at Airtable. We’re so excited to share an improvement to interfaces that will let you print some layouts or save them as PDFs.

What can you print or save as a PDF?

For certain Interface layouts, you’ll now be able to easily print interface pages or save them as PDFs.

We currently support the following layouts:

• List
• Timeline
• Calendar
• Record Details
• Individual record detail pages
• Up to 100 record detail pages in one PDF
• Charts

We’ve also made some improvements to printing views from the Data tab as well for Calendar and List.

How do you print?

There are two ways a user can trigger an export in Interfaces: by hitting Cmd/Ctrl + P, and by clicking the “Print” option at the top of the page under the “...” menu. 

You can also choose “Format for printing” to help print-outs be more legible. This will change the background and border colors of records to make it a bit easier to read.

What is not supported yet?

• Print for Timeline view in the Data tab
• Print for Grid and Gallery layouts in Interfaces
• More than 100 record details
• Automation support for generating PDFs
• Other export formats, like PNG or CSV

If you have feedback on what would be helpful for us to support next, please let us know so we can prioritize accordingly.

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We’re looking forward to hearing what you think, please let us know if you have any questions.

This update is rolling out to customers over the next couple of weeks. If you’re an enterprise customer, please reach out to your account manager with any questions.

[corb1]

Very nice.

[Karlstens]

This is most interesting, thanks for sharing! You've mentioned that;

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@Ayesha_Bose wrote:

What is not supported yet?

• Print for Timeline view in the Data tab
• Print for Grid and Gallery layouts in Interfaces
• More than 100 record details
• Automation support for generating PDFs
• Other export formats, like PNG or CSV

May I ask, are these items on the development roadmap, with a planned release? Is there a beta testing application available for testing and feedback?

When it comes to printing record data, obviously a go-to for many users has been the Page Designer App - and although it has some very specific problems of its own (no multi-page support and non-dynamic linked elements (resulting in text from one element clashing with another ), it does get a few things right - like having a tight output with minimum wasted white-space and the ability to host a company logo.

I have some questions if you're up for answering. 😃

• Are there plans to refine options for interfaces to allow for tighter placement of elements with smaller margins?
• Can we please get dynamic colours in interfaces, so that, an interface regions colour can be influenced by a Single Select fields colour.
• Can we have an image element for the task of hosting a static logo within an interface. 

[Ayesha_Bose]

@Karlstens: thanks for taking a look! In general, we're hoping to get feedback from this new feature to help us prioritize our roadmap in this area for the next few months. We don't yet have a planned release date for any of the areas we don't support yet (and no beta right now).

• On tighter margins, we don't have any explicit plans to address this but I can see how this would be useful for printing record data! I'll pass along to the team.
• Can you tell me more about what regions you want color on? I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "an interface regions".
• We are actively thinking about ways to support adding logos into interfaces and think this is likely something that we'll tackle soon! We haven't kicked this project off yet, so we haven't finalized our approach (using an image element or something else), but this is definitely top of mind.

[Craig]

Hi Ayesha, looks good in principal. It is not yet available in our interface though, whether or not we add a new page. Also, without the ability to specify the page size in the3 designer, it will be very limited in usage.

[Ayesha_Bose]

@Craig: if you're an enterprise customer, this update will be slowly rolling out over the next couple of weeks (you can reach out to your account manager for more info). Otherwise, you should be able to see the option when you create a new page like a List or Timeline under the "..." menu in the top right.

On page size, we're relying primarily on the browser's settings for page size in the print dialog: 

Once you have access, would love to learn if that setting is sufficient for your use case or if there are other sizes / settings you need!

[JayR]

Hey

This is a great addition as we've been trying to figure out an alternative solution at our company to do exactly this. Just wondering if there's anyway we can take the pdf of the whole record detail without doing this multiple times. Currently it looks like you have to only do sections at a time. Is there possibly something I'm doing wrong or is this how it currently works. Strangely enough I can zoom out to 25% and then use CTRL + P and it actually grabs a lot more pages at normal view size.

[NikolinaGaraca]

This is a great addition to interfaces! We're endorsing this to be prioritized in the future:

• Automation support for generating PDFs 

Actually, automation support for taking e.g. daily screenshots of data in an interface (be it in PDF or any other format) would be highly appreciated!
Great job, Airtable team!  

[Marcelo]

Hi there! 
It is an amazing function that we have been waiting for a long time! I was about to start with add-on tools, but let's hope this improves

Some observations:
in portrait mode it does not print everything on the screen. For example, in the graph below it should go up to month 12

and now that i see it, just print the first page

But as I said before, we hope this will improve with time and user feedback.

[Alvaro_Hernande]

It would be great to get fully editable PDF`s. With recognizable fonts. 

Also as @NikolinaGaraca said before, the possibility of using automations to get pdf of interfaces should be top of the top.

Thanks!

🙂

[Johnathan]

This is great to see some progress on PDF reporting here. My goal is to print multiple records on a single page, but I'd like to lay out the fields in a page designer/InDesign/WYSWYG style.

My records may have 20+ fields, and there's no way to automatically print these without stacking/grouping similar fields on top of each other. Tight and small fonts, but this type of export to a PDF is an essential daily task in my industry (commercial real estate).

With all the progress with Interface Designer, this is the last thing preventing Airtable from being a killer app for us. Right now we export to Excel and have a clunky system to accommodate. Thanks!