Just today was the first time that I ran into needing one of my Page Designer blocks to be used/tested on a different table.
That said, I couldn’t have worded your post any better. I agree 100% with all of it.
I’m now at the point of deciding if it’s worthwhile for me to spend hours to rebuild this whole block to match the existing one exactly, just to see if this new table would serve a useful purpose for a few others to use. :man_facepalming:
Yep. Copied my Invoice table to my Quotations table. They both have links to a Clients and Vendors with the same lookup fields to populated name, address, logo, etc the general info in the header and footer. Need to again design the entire page from scratch for my quotations, whilst most fields are the same name. A pity.
This seems like a table-stakes feature that should absolutely exist.
Here’s my use case if it helps. I’m using Page Designer to generate student schedules for a summer camp. I have separate Lookup columns for each class time and also for each week of the camp (8:00 W1, 9:00 W1, 8:00 W2, etc).
I need to make separate schedules for Week 1 and Week 2. Most elements between these 2 schedules are identical: The title, header image, student name, fixed times along the left-hand side. The only thing that changes is I need to swap out a few fields from W1 to W2.
It feels completely ridiculous and tedious that I need to completely rebuild the Week 2 schedule from scratch when I already have 90% of what I need completed. I can’t even multi-select elements and copy-paste them over to the other one.
Hi Scott,
Your comment seems promising! Could you be a bit more specific about this solution?
I’m guessing the Page Designer is supposed to be an “EXTENSION”, rather than an “APP”?
Plus, we can duplicate the Page Designer “Extension”, and preserve the same layout in the duplicate.
But, if we want the duplicated Page Designer to work for another table, say I created the Page Designer for Table 1 and now I need the same Page Designer layout for Table 2. This is seemingly impossible. Because the Page Designer “Extension” would just wipe out everything and made us start from scratch. Even when Table 1 and Table 2 are identical.
Oh right, good point. Even if you duplicate the Page Designer extension, you still have to start all over again from scratch to use a different table.
Unfortunately, Page Designer is extremely limited. It can’t even be automated to print documents or to create PDF files, and it can’t even automatically insert its documents into an attachment field.
Your best bet would be to use an external document creation tool, such as Documint or Docupilot.
Both of these have native extensions for Airtable, and you can further automate them with a low-code/no-code automation tool like Make.com.
You could even use plain old fashioned Google Docs, which can be automated with On2Air: Actions.
Has this issue still not been addressed? Why in the world can we not duplicate static items and just remove the linked fields? Seems like an easy fix that would benefit a lot of users.
