Automation, Extension

[Grimi]

Hi guys 🙂

How (or is it) is it possible to save and attach a document what is generated by the extension?

With Page Design I designed a bill, and I would like to attach that bill to the exact data.

Is that possible?

Thank you all for any thoughts

[Dimitris_Goudis]

Hey @Grimi,

You have firstly to create the document and upload it on the record, due to you can't add an action to run the extension from automations. 

Otherwise something I do and I recommend is to use make to automate the pdf generation process.

Yours sincerely,
Dimitris Goudis 

[Zack_S]

Unfortunately no, you would have to print/save as a pdf and then save to an attachment field.

If you wanted to automate the process you could with something like documint or pdf.co.

[Grimi]

Thank you 🙂

I thought so (that it is not possible directly with the automation). Now i am trying with the Pdf.co, with not much luck.

[Grimi]

Thank you 🙂 I thought so (that it is not possible directly with the automation). Now i am trying with the Pdf.co, with not much luck.

[ScottWorld]

Airtable’s automations have the ability to create an extremely basic Google Document (which can be automated within the same Airtable automation to save as a PDF file into an attachment field), but it creates extremely basic documents and won't fit most people’s needs.

To automatically create a more professional PDF document, you would need to turn to external tools.

There are dozens of different services out there that provide this functionality, such as Documint or Docs Automator or Formstack Documents or PDFMonkey, and there are many more out there as well..

All of these could be fully automated with Make which is a low-code/no-code automation tool that doesn’t require any knowledge of coding.

You could even use plain old fashioned Google Docs or Microsoft Word as well, which is typically the best option. These can both be automated by using Make as well.

There is a small learning curve with Make, which is why I created this basic navigation video to help. I also provide the links to a few other Make training resources there as well.

p.s. If you have a budget for your project and you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with any of this, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consulting — ScottWorld

[Dimitris_Goudis]

Hey @Grimi, 

I would recommend to do it using a make.com process. PDF.co solution is a little bit painful till we understand how it works.. 

For any kind question please do not hesitate to text me. 

Yours sincerely,
Dimitris Goudis 

[Grimi]

Actually, I do not want to create a professional PDF document. I want to save as a PDF document the result of an Extension (Page designer). And that exact PDF to attach to the data from where it was created.

Unfortunately, have no extra budget. I would like to do it myself. 

[Grimi]

Hi 🙂 Thank you, I was looking the make.com. Obviously need to learn a bit before I will be able to use it (and I am still not 100% sure that it will fulfil my requests).

[Sergio]

HI!

You can do this by adding the Plumsail Documents extension button to generate documents from Airtable. Plumsail Documents is a tool for automatically generating documents from templates of the most popular formats (PDF, DOCX, PPTX, etc.). When you add an extension button, move the switch so that the received document is attached to the record in the table. 

You will have to create an invoice template in Plumsail Documents and generate a document using it, but this will solve your problem of attaching a file to a record.