How to create more than one form in Page designer

[Patrick813]

Hi, Crazy question, but can’t seem to get this.
Does the page designer only allow one form? I’ve created a form in the page designer. How do I create a second form, third, or fourth?
Any help will be greatly appreciated :slightly_smiling_face: Thanks, Pat

[ScottWorld]

Hi Pat,

You are correct — the Page Designer only allows one page design per app.

So, you would actually need to install the Page Designer app multiple times to create multiple different page designs.

You can rename each app installation to help you distinguish between the different apps.

And unfortunately, the big limitation with Airtable is that they only allow a maximum of 10 apps per base.

Another limitation with Page Designer is that it cannot be automated in any way.

You might want to turn to 3rd-party solutions if you want to easily & quickly create automated documents from Airtable.

Here are some of your best options:

1. One of the most popular PDF creation tools for Airtable is DocuMint. DocuMint has native Airtable support, and it also offers full Make support.

2. Another popular tool is Docs Automator, which integrates with Google Docs. It can create both Google Docs documents and turn them into PDF files.

3. PlumSail Documents is another app that has an Airtable extension and also offers full Make support.

4. Formstack Documents also has an Airtable extension and also offers full Make support.

5. However, you can choose ANY document creation app that you would like, and automate the PDF creation process by using Make’s automations & integrations. You can even use good old fashioned Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel. If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. For example, here is how you would instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable.

Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld 

[Patrick813]

Hi Scott,

Thanks for the information. Wow. I think this is a little crazy but am glad you made me aware. I couldn’t believe I couldn’t figure out how to make a second template or form!

Thanks very much, Pat

[ScottWorld]

@Patrick813

You’re welcome!

You may also want to know that there are several other limitations with the Page Designer app as well.

Two of the biggest limitations are:

1. Page Designer can “essentially” only handle single-page documents, and
2. Page Designer cannot be automated in any way at all. You can’t have it automatically create a PDF of a document, you can’t have it automatically generate or print a document, you can’t have it automatically email a document, you can’t have it automatically embed the document into an attachment field, etc.

To workaround all of these limitations, check out the alternative options that I listed in my post above.

[Patrick813]

Thanks again. This is very useful information.
I used to use a workaround to make a “pdf” in Airtable. I would upload the document to Airtable as an attachment, get the image address, insert this an Image in pagedesigner and use this as a “background”, then populate fields on top of this. Overall it worked well.
I made a switch in DB to Ninox and have been using Zapier to send data to Pdffiller.com Which has worked well.
I have the Plus plan in Airtable and since you can now ad Apps (3) to this I thought I’d try again and see what happens. For whatever reason now when I try this I can’t get the attachment I’m inserting as an image/background to not distort when I enlarge it. I’m not shocked but also not sure why it worked before.
Thanks again for your feedback. I really appreciate it. Pat

[ScottWorld]

That's great that you got that working with Zapier and PDFFiller. You may want to also explore Make's automations & integration, which is much cheaper than Zapier yet much more powerful than Zapier.

I do a brief comparison between Make vs. Zapier in this thread.

Make natively supports PDFFiller as well.

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant