[SOLVED] Ability to Design a Page for Printing

[Patrick_Meier]

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.

[Matt_Sayward]

Can any of the Airtable staff let me know if something like this is being investigated?

I’m worried I’m putting more and more data in Airtable and using wonky, easily-breakable solutions as workarounds.

It would reduce my “Am I putting my eggs in the right basket” anxiety haha.

[Christian_Morit]

One day of learning and playing arround with airtable, another day to build my own DB for making cutouts from film scripts - I’m exited about airtable and really would like to switch from Access to this wonderful tool.

Only barrier is that there are no layout options for printing. In my case the requirements are low, for example changing character size and row heigth. And when printing expanded records, hidden fields should not appear.

Hoping for a solution and wishing all the best for airtable team!

[Matt_Sayward]

YOU GUYS!

I found way to do this for free with Zapier and Google Cloud Print - it accepts HTML markup, and you can get it to print to PDF.

[Dave_Run]

Printing .

As part of our safety program, we are required to print out a copy of our action log once a week, the " Print View" works well for a table. Request : Please allow us to add a Title to the printed copies, I,m surprised this is not already implemented,. Printed Copies should always have a title for what they represent .

[AlyB]

Hi Matt,
I would be thrilled to be able to customize my Airtable reports and I’m excited you found a solution. Could you share details of how you got it to work? Thank you!

[Keith_Myer]

This. This. This. Please say many things. Explanatory, Tutorial Things. Teach us.

[Matt_Sayward]

When I’ve got a little time later on this week, I’ll break down the full workflow I set up to make this work.

Please note though, that this a design per-record rather than per-view.

So ideal for generating a document related to record, like for example an invoice. Not so much for building list-type views.

[Derek_Clark]

Agreed. The ability to generate a formatted PDF / report from a given record or table would be extremely useful. Sharing a link to Airtable gets the job done a lot of the time but it isn’t always the best solution.

[Lyon_Beton]

Hi guys,
I’m facing the same issue as I need to print a document from a row in Airtable.
I’ll really be happy if Matt_Sayward can share his solution using Google Cloud Print and zappier.

In the mean time, i’ve done some research by my own.
I may have a clue. Did some of you try to use Ultradox ?
They don’t ave an API working with zapier, but they’ve got an add-on for Google Docs that can generate a document based on Google spreadsheets data (and as you know, you can connect Airtable with G. spreadsheet with zapier or a CSV export).
Looks like to be a cheap solution as Ultradox offers a limited free plan.

Here are some links:
https://www.ultradox.com/

chrome.google.com

Ultradox Template Editor - Google Docs add-on

Automate your business and let the cloud work for you! Merge formatted data from your contacts, sheets or forms into your templates.

It’s just a clue, but it may help. I’m gonna to try it these week. I’ll keep you updated.
If it’s doesn’t work I’ll do the formatting of my invoices with google spreadsheets, it works too.

[Matt_Sayward]

So this is the way I’ve set this up.

Go over to Zapier and make a new zap. Make the first step Airtable > New Record and find the Base and Table you want to make your printouts from.

The second step is to choose Google Cloud Print. Use the action ‘Submit Print Job’.

After you’ve authenticated with your Google account, you’ve got the following options to fill out:

Content

This is where you’ll code up your page printout.

Before you type anything in, click the button in the top right of the content box and choose all of the fields you want to display information from in your printout.

They’ll look like this in situ:

Once you’ve added all the fields you need to work with, select them all and copy and paste them into your text editor of choice. They will change from their graphical appearance to something more like {{11915855__Customer Name}}.

In a seperate file on your text editor, write up your document using HTML and CSS. The following document structure worked for me:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<header>
<style>
CSS here
</style>
<body>
HTML content here
</body>
</html>

Keep your code as simple as possible - Act as if you’re coding for email rather than the web. I put all my content in a 100% width table. When the document got turned into a PDF, this told Google Cloud Print to use the full width of the page.

Once you’ve finished making your HTML template, start copying and pasting the Zapier fields into their relevant places.

For example:

<tr><td>Name:</td><td>{{11915855__Customer Name}}</td></tr>

Once you’ve finished all this, select the whole text document and paste it back into the Content field on Zapier.

You’ll see the snippets like the above convert back to the graphical representations, like this:

You’ve now finished the hard part!

Content Type

Choose HTML in the dropdown box

Which Printer

Choose ‘Save to Google Drive’

Title of Print Job

Use your fields here to make a unique name for each file. I used the below structure - do whatever is most appropriate for your use case!

Number of copies

Choose 1

Color or monochrome

Choose color

Duplex

I left this blank

Now, run a test before clicking Finish on your zap. You should see a document appear in your Google Drive populated with the contents of your most recent record.

Let me know if this worked for you!