Im not sure where Airtable is headed. But id be happy to print a customer a nice Paper with all the Products he ordered. I guess id like to make different form views like in Filemaker.
I just signed up for WebMerge and verified it can do the things I want through my Zapier account. It works!
It’s not directly integrated into the Airtable Interface, and that’s ok as far as I’m concerned. Sure, there’s no free option and the cheapest option is $30 a month so I can see that being a deal breaker, and it has way more functionality than anything that will be developed right away (no offense to the developers).
For invoices, I think there are better solutions out there, and this one could certainly be made to work well if that was your thing.
Previous post withdrawn because it really didn’t say anything useful. My ideal world has WebMerge functionality within Airtable. til then I’ll use web merge.
First of all, thanks for reading & considering user feedback!
One example of how I’d use a printable form view of Airtable data would be to print a medical visit report. We regularly support our clients with medical appointments and with following Dr. instructions. I’ve created tables and associated form views for inputting data and holding the data. What I’d love would be the option to create a printable form view where I could choose which record to display and also choose which fields to show. That would enable me to export medical reports, for instance. The vertical alignment of each field would work, though ideally, I’d like to be able to further customize the reports using something similar to a mail merge template - the primary advantage being more efficient use of space on the printed report.
An additional benefit of this would be to be able to have much more compact output. We have just moved from ragic to air-table but the air-table forms for embedding in our wiki and other pages are very “large”. If we had custom control of the layout this would be very nice!
I work in a hospital and most of our reports have to be formatted in a specific way to satisfy our corporate and joint commission requirements. By doing that, they can audit our reports quickly since every hospital looks the same. We are currently doing these in Documents and spreadsheets and they are then printed and included in binders that we are required to keep.
You can email me directly at mcalhoun@nw-health.com and I can send you examples of these reports if needed.
Alongside linking to other bases, this seems like the next biggest missing feature preventing a swathe of companies from using for most of their key information tracking.
I desperately want to use Airtable for as much as possible, and having spent the last few weeks looking at the lay of the land technology-wise, I don’t think there’s an acceptable solution to do this with as an integration. WebMerge is prohibitively expensive ($0.50 per doc - the documents I want to create simply aren’t worth that much, and tying in with Zapier can mean a quarter hour delay before the document even comes through, and even then it can fail occasionally.) The other option should be Google Docs, but their API isn’t sophisticated enough to pass anything other than plaintext through. I had a chat with an engineer at Zapier, and he couldn’t think of anything other than WebMerge at this time.
So I think Airtable should roll their own, and I think the answer lies in HTML/CSS.
I’ve mocked it up:
In this example, you would write / paste your HTML and CSS into the Code area, and use percentage wrappers (I.e. %%Field Name%%) to call in data from records in the field.
For example:
<p>Dear %%Title%% %%Surname%%,</p>
<p>Thank you for your purchase of %%Product%%.</p>
Obviously it could be a lot more complex than this, and you could roll your own styling through CSS.
Then you have the option of generating this code to a HTML, PDF or DOC output.
On the mockup above, there’s an inactive tab called Preview Text. This would be to control what was displayed in the field as the link to the output. In this case, I’ve gone for ‘See invoice’
This to me seems like a sensible, pragmatic way to manage document merges in 2016, in a non-prohibitive language many are familiar with.
Matt, I really like this proposal for HTML/CSS document merging.
The barrier to entry for implementing this is low and it seems like a pragmatic approach.
Hope to see this, or something similar to it, implemented.
On Airtable’s side, I could see why they would want to do something simpler or altogether code-free so that it was easy for any user to take advantage of a feature like this.
Ooh, that’s a really good idea. I hope one of these two approaches gets used!
@Katherine_Duh - Are either of these approaches something that have been kicked around internally already? I’m sure there are complications unforeseen, at least on my part.
this would be really nice, but I can also see the difficulty in implementing something that works for everyone.
but even only a few basic options like header / footer, image size, what to do with long text, etc. would be great.
(also, one record per page)
some day in the future, an extended feature-set like designing forms / reports as you can in filemaker would also be really nice.
