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Hi all,

I’ve got a whole workflow already created and working which creates a complex, well-formatted Google Doc from a Google Doc template, filling it in with data from a Google Sheet and exporting it to a PDF. 

Now I want to enhance this document by inserting custom images--namely charts created by the Quickchart.io action (created with data from the same Google Sheet). 

I’ve got it to the point where I can insert the URL produced by Quickchart.io, but I cannot figure out a way to insert the IMAGE produced by the URL. I know that one can create a Google Doc from HTML and create an image that way, but that’s not what I need--this is a Google Doc template that’s already formatted exactly the way I want, and I cannot recreate that with HTML.

Google Docs created manually via the browser can have an image inserted based on a URL, which is what I would use if I were creating this manually, but I can’t figure out a way to do that via Zapier’s template-filling action or similar hack.

Any ideas? Thanks.

/mike

Hi @mikegriefkey 

Good question.

I’ve run into this issue where a GDoc Template being created via a Zap cannot handle HTML unfortunately.

You can try using a different PDF creator app: https://zapier.com/apps/categories/documents

Hi @Troy Tessalone, thanks for your thoughts. 

Unfortunately, I’ve already pretty exhaustively explored other document creation solutions and in spite of some of them being quite expensive, none of them really provide the same ability that the Google Doc template filler provides, which is to easily fill a pre-formatted document with data, and easily export to a PDF. The tools that allow creation of PDFs assume that it’s going to be used in certain ways or is part of some business process workflow that they facilitate. If you have a SPECIFIC one you want to point me to that actually solves my problem and is just as easy to use, by all means, please let me know which one you’re referring to.

But as of right now, all the other document integrations in Zapier’s list seem to be far harder to use, don’t do the more basic things I’m already doing with Google Docs, and are very expensive.  

/mike

Hi @mikegriefkey!

I spent some time playing with Google doc templates and I can’t find a way to embed an image placeholder.

One workaround that some folks use is to create a Google Slide template and use Zapier to create a document based on that. I’ve not tried it myself, but my understanding is that you change the page set up of the slide to be A4 portrait, add everything that you need in the template and use Zapier to fill in the placeholders. I hope that helps!

Hi there, friends! 👋🏽 I wanted to pop in and consolidate some of these answers into one in case it’s helpful! 

I’ve run into this issue where a GDoc Template being created via a Zap cannot handle HTML unfortunately.

You can try using a different PDF creator app: https://zapier.com/apps/categories/documents

 

I spent some time playing with Google doc templates and I can’t find a way to embed an image placeholder.

One workaround that some folks use is to create a Google Slide template and use Zapier to create a document based on that. I’ve not tried it myself, but my understanding is that you change the page set up of the slide to be A4 portrait, add everything that you need in the template and use Zapier to fill in the placeholders. I hope that helps!

 

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