[SOLVED] Ability to Design a Page for Printing

Makes sense, we’ve heard this from a number of customers. Would it work if we just had a print setting that printed each record as a page sort of like our expanded records? So all of the fields would be arranged vertically in a somewhat compact way, but you wouldn’t have control over the actual layout of those pages.

I also think a printing option would be very helpful. But to me some customization options as to what we’d like to include in the print out and how it should appear on the page would be essential.

It whould be a start Andrew :slightly_smiling_face: As Markus said it whould be nice to add a Logo and what not. And a field that opens the whole iDevice Screen for a Signature.

Just want to add this is really critical for us. Airtable has the potential to be a great tool for our work, but images are a big part of what we need to store and access in tables. We need to be able to create a nicely formatted report with data and pictures to give to our clients and contractors. Currently, I can expand a record and use the browser print function, but that cuts off the title and it truncates the text in long text fields.

Thanks!

I would just like to add my need for a print option for selecting a group of records and printing in form view not table view.

The print options requested here seem like they fall into the “report” category that most other database applications support. Reporting is one of the key features that makes a database application different than a simple flat spreadsheet. I really like the ease of use of the spreadsheet DB UI, but sophisticated printable reporting would really improve this product and turn it into a real Filemaker killer for a huge portion of FMP users.

Would love to have a possibility to design reports.

I sell art and I’m looking for a software that can help me generate reports for all kind of stuff (insurance, inventory, work lists etc.). I don’t need the same kind of information for every report, but they can be created from the same base. Also the different reports have to look different. When I want to show a client a work I want a clean one page report with a big picture, basic information and my business information, but when I print out a list of works I want multiple pieces on the same page. If this si on the to do list this would make Airtable a killer tool!

I know I have already commented on the ability to print with a condensed view of the expanded records (in other words fit all fields or better still the fields I select) on one page. Currently I am limited to a large vertical print that sometimes extends over 6 pages. This will not work for us. I have very much wanted to include Airtable in our workflow but without this ability we have not used the app since our initial setup and testing. We are headed to Daytona with Harley-Davidson and had hoped to make this app work for us at this Corporate Event (several times a year) but clean professional print pages for our clients would be paramount.

I very much hope to see this pushed to the top of the production list at Airtable so we might come back to revisit the idea of using this app in the future, but for now it is just not quite there.

Good luck Airtable team.

Rick

When printing 8/5 x 11, portrait and selecting “Fit to width”, only about 2/3 of the page is used and the balance of the print starts on subsequent pages. It seems that the “Fit to width” option does not account for the fact that the text will be shrunk to fit the page width AND also you can get more lines per page as well.

Printable reports sounds like the opportunity for a complete second product/service/application.

Providing a visual interface, to take the response of JSON-APIs, formatting the Data, and applying a Template.

Typically to generating a HTML Output suitable to Print. Other ways to publish output the content could be a FTP-Server or publish on a host for static websites (e.g. github pages).

HTML is a great for generating PDF-Files as well. In our company we generate vast amounts of PDF-Files for our customers using Prince XML. Works like a charm. Docraptor provides an API to generate PDF-Documents with Prince.

Use Cases:

• Printing/Exporting Students Report Cards
• Generating a listing of Available Properties of a sales agen and pubish it on his website
• For the same sales Agent: Generating individual Handouts for every available property
• generating a XML Product feed for Google Merchant Center
• Printing a Custom address book (Yes I know :winking_face: the little black book)

An Application like that could be limited to Airtable, but doesn’t have to be. Integrations of other APIs and Headless content management systems could be added later. E.G. enabling cases like:

• Pulling stats from Twitter for a Social media Report
• A visual way to publishing data from contentful on a static site
• pulling in information from social media accounts based on the ID stored on airtable
• adding reviews from rotten tomatoes to the printed catalog of my collection SciFi DVDs

Headless CMS and Public APIs are gaining traction in the marked. But currently we lag a way for non-developers to turn them into a human friendly form.

I think an ideal argument for being able to export data via XML etc is so that individual components of a document such as a proposal or insurance policy can be maintained via Airtable, and then those elements can be exported to populate a custom printed document with the customer’s info, terms, etc. That’s the functionality I would most appreciate.

It would be nice to have a print option that had the pictures in a bigger size. I use airtable as a client database and have a profile picture for each person. When I go to print a list of clients it would be nice to have the pictures bigger so you can actually see what the individual looks like. Right now I have to print each clients profile individually if I want to have their picture big enough. Any suggestions? Also is this anything airtables developers plan to implement in the future?

+1 for this.

I’m using Airtable to track customers that take out a warranty for one of my products.

The data I need is already in Airtable, but I’m duplicating it all by making a piece of branded documentation for the customer to take away. If I could generate the print out within Airtable itself that would be killer.

Adding the word processing capabilities to make the documents within Airtable itself would probably be a lot of work, but I bet there’d be a smart way to do this with a Google Docs integration.

Something like - Set a Google Doc as a template file, fill it with markers like $$Customer Name$$, $$Customer Address$$ etc as a signal for where Airtable should put the information from the record, and then Airtable generates additional documents based on the initial template file with the Customer Name and Address filled out accordingly.

You could have a new field type for Actions where you’d process these on the fly. So there could be a Create Printout button which would tell Google Docs to make a new documents based on the record Create Printout was clicked in. Then, since that document had been generated, the button could change to View Printout.

Follow up: You can do a decent job of this by using Zapier with WebMerge.

I have recently joined air table. The product is great and Easy to use. I found that it lacks in formatted reports.

It would be nice to be able to be able to print documents frequently needed in any business operation like Work Orders, invoices, Purchase orders, Pay slips.

To be able to be used in business environment, this capability is must. Hope this feature will be added soon.

I just joined air table over the weekend and really, really like what I see. I own a small human-services agency. Air table’s spreadsheet as a DB functionality has fantastic promise to help me manage client and employee details, in a team environment. To really deliver on that promise, however, I require the ability to output data in a custom template or at least in form view (provided we could control data was presented on the form).

Please, please make that happen soon!

Sincerely,

Joe

Just wanted to let you all know that we are reading your feedback and taking it into consideration! Based on the popularity of this topic, it seems like more options for printing are really important for a lot of our users.

Patrick, Rick, and Joe—all of you mentioned your desire for a printable form view. Would any of you care to expand on what you mean by that? Did you mean having all of the information for a single record in a single page, with all of the fields aligned vertically (like how Andrew mentioned, way back at the beginning of this thread)? How does the current layout of our forms/our expanded records compare to your ideal printable form view?

Thanks again, everyone, for all of your feedback. Please keep the suggestions coming!

Katherine,
I meant a similar situation as the old Bento many of us used prior to Airtable where I might setup a custom print option. This custom print option would allow me to print only fields I would select to be printed and fit to a standard page size (8.5x11).

Example:
I have an event setup where we photograph and sell products. We would like to use Airtable to document many facets of the session including the clients name, address, image number chosen, package ordered etc…
I need the ability to print this information and pass it on to the client as a receipt of which items were purchased as well as the cost associated and a couple of other fields but NOT include all field in the database as we have up to 40 fields that are not necessary to be printed on the page.

We would need these items

1. Ability to pick fields printed
2. Ability to arrange the fields on the page in columns (not just one field per line)
3. Not a priority but the ability to choose the paper size I would be printing on.
4. Ability to include headers and footers (in other words brand the print with company logo, info, etc.) Also nice but not an immediate necessity.
5. Ability to save this information into a favorite, or default for that particular database template.

Thanks for looking into this.

Rick

Maybe the way to do this for individual records should be similar to mail merge?

Have a new field type called Document Merge. Within the field options would be 2 settings, one to upload a template document, and the second to set a name parameter. Then within each record would be a field containing a button that called the name parameter (For example ‘View Invoice’ or ‘Customer Summary’)

The template document could have a structure like:

{Airtable_Customer_Created_Date}

Dear {Airtable_Customer_Title} {Airtable_Customer_Name},

Thanks for purchasing the {Airtable_Product_Name}.

et cetera

A way to design a printout for all records in a view would be awesome as well.

Yes Yes! I run inventories, and invoicing through filemaker, but their iOS options are clunky and severally limited. If air table had the ability for me to layout an invoice, like an input form but already filled in, that would rule. The ability to sum numbers columns would be handy as well, and options for print layouts seems like a must for me.

@Matt_Sayward @Katherine_Duh

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.

Katherine,

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.

Thanks again for your consideration!

Sincerely,

Joe

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.