Using Airtable and Google Docs to Generate PDFs on Command

Question

Hi all,We’re a very small company looking to generate invoices for our clients from their Airtable data. So far I’ve gathered that I need to pull the data from Airtable, send it to a Google Doc template, get a Google Drive share link for the doc, and send that via Gmail to the email in the Airtable record.There’s three things I can’t figure out how to do:I don’t want it to automatically be triggered at some specific time. I want to manually run the automation to pull the data from all records in the Airtable view and generate the Google Doc templates. How can I do this? All I’ve been able to find are triggers to do it automatically, when in my case I want to be the one to “Say Go”	I want it to generate the Google Docs from all records in the Airtable. So far, all I’ve been able to figure out how to do is “Find” one Airtable record and perform the Zap on that record.	I would love for it to send a PDF instead of a Google Drive link, and to reattach that PDF back to the Airtable record it pulled the info from.I’m pretty tech-savvy (comfortable with low-to-no-code solutions), and we do not have it in our budget to pay someone else to do this for us or to pay an expensive third-party SaaS app. Any help would be very appreciated!

Troy Tessalone · Accepted Answer

Hi@user138Why not add a field (checkbox, single select) that will move the record into a Filtered View that can be used to trigger the Zap, then you can control it manually.You’ll need to leverage the Airtable API: https://airtable.com/apiApp APIs can be used in Zap with the Webhooks app as an action step: https://zapier.com/apps/webhook/integrationsGDrive provides a PDF version for a file:

user138 · Answer

Hi@user138Why not add a field (checkbox, single select) that will move the record into a Filtered View that can be used to trigger the Zap, then you can control it manually.You’ll need to leverage the Airtable API: https://airtable.com/apiApp APIs can be used in Zap with the Webhooks app as an action step: https://zapier.com/apps/webhook/integrationsGDrive provides a PDF version for a file:Hi @Troy Tessalone, Thanks so much for the response! I’m very new to Zapier, so apologies if my understanding is elementary.So I would need to set up something in the Zap that would say, once this box is checked, move it to a filtered view? I’m still not quite understanding the manual control piece.I’ve seen Webhooks mentioned in other community posts, but I’m really unclear on what they do or how to set it up for what I need. I tried one user’s post on how to do it, and wound up with every single record’s entry for a specific column inserted into one template file (rather than having separate template-generatedfiles for each record)How do I access that pdf link within the Zap?Thanks again!

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