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Aug 03, 2023 08:06 AM
I use Airtable for my small property management business. I have to send a list of customers and some data about them to my insurance agent every year as part of the renewal process for my liability insurance. Insurance companies do not want electronic views of databases. They want hard copies. Paper. To do this, it appears that I have to spend a considerable amount of money to use another application to get my data out of Airtable.
Is there a way to print a view or an Interface, or send a pdf of the info, or an email that can be printed? If not, then Airtable has become of no value to me. I need to communicate the way my vendors do. A cannot bend to them to using systems they do not want. I am a very small company. They are very large.
If there is away, would someone please let me know how to go about it?
Many thanks, Scott
Solved! Go to Solution.
Aug 03, 2023 04:49 PM - edited Oct 29, 2023 10:46 AM
Unfortunately, Airtable does not support printing anything at this time, outside of the very limited Page Designer extension, which can only print documents that don't exceed one page. However, Page Designer cannot be automated in any way.
So yes, as you said, most users need to use external tools to print documents from Airtable. Two of the popular options are DocuMint and DocsAutomator, and of course you can use Make to create documents with Google Docs, Microsoft Word, or any other document-creation app.
Aug 03, 2023 04:49 PM - edited Oct 29, 2023 10:46 AM
Unfortunately, Airtable does not support printing anything at this time, outside of the very limited Page Designer extension, which can only print documents that don't exceed one page. However, Page Designer cannot be automated in any way.
So yes, as you said, most users need to use external tools to print documents from Airtable. Two of the popular options are DocuMint and DocsAutomator, and of course you can use Make to create documents with Google Docs, Microsoft Word, or any other document-creation app.
Aug 04, 2023 06:44 AM
Thank you for your information and recommendations. I find it hard to continue with Airtable because it appears from my prospective as a small business owner that all they are in business to do is to either get you to upgrade to a plan that is way out of financial reach for someone like me or to get other vendors business by saying we can't do that but so and so can for $49 per month. It is not feasible to constantly add monthly charges to get something as simple as a csv export of data. That is something I could do in 1985 on a pre-386 intel based dos machine. Thanks for your input, I'm done venting. Best, Scott
Aug 04, 2023 07:55 AM
I have to generate a lot of paper reports out of the data we keep in Airtable, and initially we did not have any budget for add-on services. Here are some methods I use:
None of the above are perfect. I'm planning to move our reports over to a 3rd party document service when I have time (... and when I decide if our small Enterprise level org is going to stay on airtable or move to a different platform...)
Aug 04, 2023 08:00 AM
It is not feasible to constantly add monthly charges to get something as simple as a csv export of data.
You were talking about printing, not exporting CSV files. You don't have to add monthly charges to get a CSV export of data, since that is built into Airtable. Also, Liz gave you some good free printing ideas above as well.
Aug 21, 2023 06:36 PM
To be fair, OP wasn't really "talking about printing". He needs to "send a list of customers and some data about them to my insurance agent …to get my data out of Airtable." And therefore was wondering about "a way to print a view or an Interface, OR send a pdf of the info, OR an email that can be printed."
Your initial solution latched on to Airtable's inability to print without mentioning that the easiest and certainly cheapest solution for achieving his goal of sending an annual customer list would be to export the data as csv (as you say, a built-in feature), open it in a spreadsheet editor and modify as necessary before printing-to-PDF.
Nov 27, 2023 05:12 AM
Thanks for mentioning DocsAutomator @ScottWorld !
Mar 12, 2024 12:35 AM