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I’m beginning a new base for keeping track of all of our volunteers. There are several types of volunteering, like regular volunteers, community service for court, community service for work/school and so on. In most of these cases, the volunteer needs a printout of all hours worked. I was able to design a printout in page designer, but for many of our volunteers, I’ll need more than 1 page to list all their times.
My next thought was to find a way to filter out just that person and only their times worked, but I’m at a loss on how to do it. Every solution I’ve attempted so far has still included all the other volunteer names. Is it possible to isolate only a single person and print only those records in grid or table? The other issue is that any solution needs to be fast and easy. Anything that involves too much filtering, hiding or grouping for each individual will be too cumbersome. Page designer would be PERFECT except the annoying problem of only being able to print a single page at this time. (Seriously, 99% of my issues with airtable would be resolved if page designer has multi-page functionality.)
Here is a link to the base so far: https://airtable.com/shr827QaZRETSva7t
It’s still in its infancy so much of our data isn’t included yet. This is just my starting point, and there is enough data there to play with.
It sounds like your base design might need a tweak. You can isolate all hours worked for a specific volunteer if you do something like this:
Two tables: something like [Hours Worked] for tracking hours, and [Volunteers] for tracking volunteers. Each listing on the [Hours Worked] table will record a number of hours, and link to the appropriate volunteer from the [Volunteers] table.
Your Page Designer layout will be built from the [Volunteers] table, with the volunteer name at the top, and a table below that based on the incoming links for all of their recorded hours. Drop the link field into Page Designer, and it will default to Table mode, with options for customizing the table to show the specific details you want from each linked record. More on that can be seen here (click the “Linked record field Elements” topic link to go to the part of the instructions showing how to set this up):
I just ran a quick test, and found that Page Designer actually does support multi-page functionality. However, it’s not very intuitive to use unless you’ve played with it a bit, and there are some minor drawbacks.
First you need to set your Page Designer page dimensions to be large enough to cover more than one page. I just ran a test with a “page” size of 927x2400, roughly double the height of the default Letter resolution. After linking one record to a truckload of other records in another table, adding that linked field in table style in Page Designer, and scaling that table area to cover the full two-page spread, it printed across two pages.
Here are the drawbacks I noticed in my admittedly-brief test:
It wasn’t necessarily the cleanest print. The bottom grid border of the last row on the first page was missing, but if you don’t need grid borders, you can nix them and this won’t be an issue. On the plus side, it didn’t chop off in the middle of a line of text as long as I set a page margin above the default of 0 pixels.
It will try to print your full multi-page spread every time, even if there’s only enough content for the first page. If you have a short list to print, you’ll have to manually tell the print dialog to only print the first page.
I will certainly try playing with page designer more! I do have the setup as you described, and I was able to isolate an individual volunteer using page designer, but printing was the big issue which I think you just solved for me! Thank you!
