Best practices for working with forms handling ite...

[WilliamPorter]

I’m trying to create my first invoice using a page designer block and I’m stumped already. I want to be able to create an invoice design (what in FileMaker we would call a “layout”) that works equally well with 2 records and 200, i.e. that can print as a one page invoice (with just a few line items) or a multipage invoice with an indefinite number of records. Is this possible?

Second, will the page designer shrink rows in a table on the page designer block if the row doesn’t require the full height?

To be clear, in FileMaker (as also in a merge document in Word or even in an HTML table), it is easy to get tabular data to display in rows of different heights, somewhat like this:

5/1/2019 Ate dinner
5/2/2019 Sat around and watched movies all evening and then went out late at 
               night and got pizza from Eno's and sat there and ate it. Got dessert
               too. Stayed until closing.
5/4/2019 Took a ride on my bike around the lake. 

and so on. In FileMaker I’d design the row to be tall enough to accommodate what I anticipate to be the longest description I’ll ever see. It usually make it really tall, because I’ll also configure the row element to SHRINK when the content doesn’t fill the allotted space. So you see above that the entry for 5/1 is just one line, while the entry for 5/2 is three lines. (Hope this doesn’t get too messed up when I hit submit.)

Can we do this in Airtable? I see that we can create custom page sizes, but is that the only option? And what about shrinking rows in a table when the content allows it?

[scotty321]

Yes, Airtable automatically handles varying heights of rows with the Page Designer Block, so you don’t need to worry about that.

It’s not like FileMaker, where you have to pre-adjust for the very tallest height that you think you’re ever going to have.

[WilliamPorter]

Thanks, scotty321. But there was another part to my question. Can Airtable print a report that has a varying number of pages? For example, say I have a Contacts base with 800 records in it. One day I might want to print just the names and contact info of my friends or family in a city that I’m traveling to; that might be half a page. But on some other day I might want to print all 800 contacts. At 25 contacts a page, that might be 30+ pages. Can I do that in Airtable?

[WilliamPorter]

Bumping this. Would really like to know if it is possible to get the Page Designer block to format printing of a bunch of records that will spread over many pages.

Actually I may be asking two distinct questions.

First, is there a way to print a list of records from a flat-file (single table) base in Airtable – but a list with some sort of a header and (at the end) a summary or totals block? I cannot see how to do it. Printing from table view precludes having (say) a logo or company info at the top of page 1.

The second question is like the first, but now I’m adding two more wishes:

• I’d like the report to continue over more than one page
• I’d like the rows in the list to be able to accommodate values of varying sizes.

I’m attaching an example of the second request. I created this in about five minutes in FileMaker, using dummy data from Mockaroo. I don’t expect or want Airtable to be FileMaker – you may safely assume that I’m exploring Airtable precisely because I think it does many interesting things that FileMaker can’t. Nevertheless basic printed reports are crucially import to me and to my clients.

Final question, which perhaps is the real question: I am getting the impression that it is NOT possible right now to do what I want natively in Airtable. So what do Airtable users do? I find it hard to believe that nobody prints reports (or generates pdf reports) from data stored in Airtable. So what do you do? Do you use Zapier and create a report that exports your data to something like Google Sheets, and then print from a template you’ve set up there?

Thanks,

Will

NOTE: the example below is a screen capture of the first half of the first page of a four page pdf