Printing multiple records on the same page with Page Designer

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:

1. 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.

2. 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”).

However, this is still a hack, and doesn’t workaround all of Page Designer’s limitations, such as not being able to be automated, and not being able to create a header or footer that shows up at the top or bottom of your list of records.

Instead, here are 4 popular solutions for automatically generating documents from Airtable that can do what you’re looking to do:

1. DocuMint — the original document creation app for Airtable. Creates PDF files.

2. DocsAutomator — creates Google Docs documents or PDF files. 

3. Make’s integrations — which can be integrated with any document-creation app of your choosing, even something as simple as custom Microsoft Word documents.
   
   If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. For example, here is one way that you can instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable.

4. Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable — which offers hundreds of features that Airtable’s forms don’t offer, such as the ability to automatically generate custom PDF files from a form submission.
   
   I show off this feature on this Airtable podcast episode:

   Using Fillout to create an eSignature approval process with PDF file creation.

Hope this helps!

If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with this or anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

Thanks for trying but that didn’t help either. When I try your hack — and when I try the instructions in Airtable’s video tutorial — I get 25 pages of one record on each page, with each record having a different position on the page.

So each record does appear below the previous record; it just appears on another page as well. I get the same result in Safari and in Chrome.

Did you choose “grid” in the print settings?

You’re welcome! The technique definitely works, since it’s the same technique that all Airtable customers have been using for years. There are only 2 steps, so make sure you’re doing both of them correctly. Keep trying, and you’ll get it!

If not, then check out the other apps I recommended above!

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

@kuovonne “Grid” gives me the same outcome as “list.”

@ScottWorld I am doing both of them correctly.

Do either of you happen to have a newer M1 Mac, by any chance? Wondering if my computer is a factor.

Yes, all of my computers are M1 Macs.

Why don’t you create a video of what you’re trying to do, so we can see where you’re going wrong?

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

This video doesn’t show a final PDF, but the layout that appears in the print dialog is the same one that appears in PDFs.

https://vimeo.com/719600688/a18f449695

@ScottWorld Thanks for this hack, worked great for my purposes! 

Hi! I had the same issue with printing multiple Airtable records on one page. I found a solution using the Plumsail Documents extension for Airtable that worked for me. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Create a new document template. The template can be in any format, such as Microsoft Office formats like Word (DOCX), Excel (XLSX), PowerPoint (PPTX), or even PDF.
2. Create a document generation process in Plumsail Documents. When creating a process, you can additionally select the delivery method for the outgoing document and its format PDF, DOCX, XLSX, or PPTX.
3. Install the Plumsail Documents extension in Airtable and set up the extension button.
4. Match the template tokens from Plumsail Documents with the fields in the Airtable table. You can copy tokens from Airtable and place them into a template table row or bullet points. The documents are in familiar Office formats, so you can match the Airtable table design or adjust it as needed. 
5. Generate your PDF document or any other format from Airtable with one click.For a detailed step-by-step guide, check out the Plumsail Guide. The images above are taken from this guide. I hope this helps!

This is super easy with FlexiPage. I’ve tailor made this extension to support multi-page documents and add automation support.

You can create templates within the extension itself

Checkout FlexiPage extension here - https://airtable.com/marketplace/blkxiBhC4JLMwyIaZ/flexipage