Custom Print Formatting of Airtable View

[BenInDallas]

Here’s my problem: I need to periodically print NICE-LOOKING reports from Airtable data, displaying dozens of records on a single page, in spreadsheet form. The standard “Print View” action doesn’t provide enough control (formatting of text, sizing of columns, custom headers & footers, etc). The new Print Layout Designer is a wonderful tool, but it only allows for one record per page.

The best option I’ve found so far is to copy-and-paste data from a given Airtable View into a Google Sheets worksheet. This gives me most of the formatting options I want, but it’s just really cumbersome to do this over and over, and I’m worried about the potential for human error. So, I’d love an automated way of doing this.

Zapier has a similar integration (https://zapier.com/app/editor/template/7324), but this doesn’t work for me, because it only sends NEW records to the sheet. If values change in an existing record (which mine do constantly… it’s exactly what we’re tracking!), the Zapier solution is worthless to me. I understand this is a limitation of the Airtable API, not Zapier.

Does anyone have a solution/idea/product/etc to automatically send ALL data (not just new records) from an Airtable view to Google Sheets or a similar app that gives me robust formatting control? Or even better, a means of converting airtable data into a custom printable format? Or anything else that would solve my problem?

[SHC-Admins]

Airtable please pay attention!!! We love Airtable in many ways, but the inability to have basic print control is a huge gap. I need to print weekly updated views of some spreadsheets, but only a subset of the data. So please develop a “save report” function that allows us to routinely print selected columns, column width, headers/footers, page #, etc. If anyone has figured out a way to do this, other than exporting to Excel and doing it manually, HELP! Page builder is not there yet!

[Elias_Gomez_Sai]

SHC-Admins:

develop a “save report” function that allows us to routinely print selected columns

That sounds like a View to me :thinking: If you design a Page Designer block based on that view, it will update automatically.

[Bill_French]

@SHC-Admins (et, al):

I do this all the time for various clients using Google Apps Script and a free Gmail account. Here’s an example -

By simply selecting a publish option in a controlling record, my systems spot that status change, export all the data required for the reports, builds them as Google Docs, saves them to Google Drive (for archive), converts them to PDF format, and emails them to target stakeholders. It’s a fully lights-out process and very reliable and fast.

First client I did this for cost them $500 and saved them $25k annually in time/effort.

Doing this as a consultant or showing power-users how to get here is not easy, but I’m working on a tool kit to make solutions like this simplified and easy to repeat.

[WilliamPorter]

Bill.French:

I do this all the time for various clients using Google Apps Script and a free Gmail account. Here’s an example -

Just seeing this for first time (some months after it was posted). I’m wondering, did you ever finish the “tool” you said you were working on? If not, can you throw us a clue about how you did this? Is it all done with Zapier?

I can see from your example that you’re starting with a Long Text field in which it appears you have typed stuff with some manually-entered formatting cues (Markdown + HTML). And I can see how you could export that one field for a filtered set of records, suck it into Google Sheets or Docs and format it from there. But I can’t guess how much of this is automated and how much of it is done manually. My guess is that the document title and perhaps document date (the first two lines of the output file in your screen capture) were entered manually, right?

William

[Bill_French]

WilliamPorterTech:

did you ever finish the “tool” you said you were working on?

No. There was little demand expressed for it by Airtable users. As such, I continue to build these solutions under consulting engagements.

WilliamPorterTech:

starting with a Long Text field in which it appears you have typed stuff with some manually-entered formatting cues (Markdown + HTML).

Yes, but this example was pre-rich-text data type version.

WilliamPorterTech:

suck it into Google Sheets or Docs and format it from there.

Yep - that’s exactly what I do.

WilliamPorterTech:

I can’t guess how much of this is automated and how much of it is done manually. My guess is that the document title and perhaps document date (the first two lines of the output file in your screen capture) were entered manually, right?

Once a user tags a report record as “ready to go”, the date, title, and everything is fully automated.