Unfortunately, amongst its many limitations, Airtable created its Page Designer to handle documents that display only one record per defined page. (If you choose to add linked records to your page, all of the linked records must also fit within the confines of one defined page.)
There are so many limitations with Page Designer (including no ability to automate the creation of PDF files and no ability to automate the insertion of the PDF file into an attachment field) that many of my Airtable consulting clients have turned to external document creation tools such as DocuMint. DocuMint was specifically created for Airtable users to overcome Airtable’s Page Designer limitations.
Alternatively, you can use an automation & integration tool like Make to send your data from Airtable to any document creation app (such as Microsoft Word or Google Sheets). This can be a little more challenging than using DocuMint, but it can be done.
However, there is a “hack” that you can use in Page Designer to print more than one record on a page, because Page Designer’s “one page” can be defined to be very small (i.e. multiple records per page) or very large (i.e. one lengthy multi-page document).
This hack works because Page Designer’s “page size” is different than the “printed paper size” that you print on.
In your case, you want your “page” to be very small. but always note that Page Designer still sees each “small page” as its own “full & complete page”. So this technique would work very well if you were just trying to print a sheet of labels or a sheet of business cards or just a list of records for your own internal usage, but it wouldn’t work well if you wanted to print a nicely-formatted list of records for a client that included a nice header at the top of your entire printed piece of paper or a nice footer at the bottom of your entire printed piece of paper. That’s because if you printed 10 records per page, you would end up with 10 headers and 10 footers. (You could print multiple linked records on a page to get around this problem, but again, all the linked records must fit within the confines of one defined page.)
So the Page Designer “hack” to print multiple records per piece of paper is this:
Within the Page Designer’s settings, specify a custom size for each record (in pixels). This is the “page size” that I was talking about above. You can use an online converter tool to convert inches to pixels. In your particular case, your custom record size will be smaller than the size of a printed piece of paper.
When you click on the print button, choose “records in a specific view”, choose the view that contains your records, and choose whether you want the records displayed in a grid (for example, printing labels or business cards) or displayed in a list. Then, make sure you choose a normal paper size. In the USA, normal paper size is Letter (8.5” x 11”).
Hope this helps! If this answers your question, could you please mark this comment as the solution to your question? This will help other people who have a similar question, because solved posts will show up higher in the search results. 🙂
p.s. If you have a budget for your project and you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with any of this, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consulting — ScottWorld
For a detailed step-by-step guide, check out the Plumsail Guide. The images above are taken from this guide. I hope this helps!
