For the longest time, I could not figure out a way to have QuestionPro survey responses upload to DropBox automatically as a PDF. I finally figured out a solution so I thought I would share and include my process in case any of the other steps would be helpful. I’m a beginner in Zapier so these are rough stabs at what I was trying to do. 

The DropBox zap allows you to create custom text files in DropBox. However, our surveys included signatures which needed to be included in the survey response.

Try Number 1: QuestionPro has an email notification function which allows you to automatically send responses as they come in to any email you identify. I started by experimenting with this and having the email sent to the Zapier email, then I used Zapier formatting to pull the html and a HTML converter application to convert it to a PDF. Initially, the HTML converter created one long PDF that was difficult to read, so I used the Zapier Formatter to split the HTML into chunks before converting it, thus manually creating separate PDF pages. The PDF page breaks were a little rough, but from there it could be uploaded to DropBox.

PROBLEM: We wanted to avoid using emails at all in the process, and adding the HTML converter application to the process was not ideal.

Try Number 2: The Google Docs zap included setting up a template. So I experimented with mapping the survey responses to a template.

PROBLEM: Now I returned to the problem that we needed the signature included. The signature showed up as an URL on the template, and was not rendered as an image.

Try Number 3 (the success): Creating a new document in the Google Docs zap includes limited HTML rendering, which would solve the signature problem. Unfortunately, the template HTML code I tried to pull from a few free sites did not work properly when uploaded into the Google Doc zap. So I wrote very basic HTML code to format the survey responses and render the image of the signature at the bottom of the page. I am not experienced in HTML and I can’t figure out how to keep the Google Doc from creating blank spaces on the generated document wherever there is HTML code, but by having the html code squished together with no spacing unless absolutely necessary, I was able to minimize blank spaces and it looks pretty good. I set this Zap to trigger anytime there is a new response in QuestionPro. 

PROBLEM: I could not figure out a way to then upload the PDF to DropBox in that same Zap. The output from the Google Doc creation did not seem to include that same PDF export link that is available when using a Google Drive zap. 

SOLUTION: I created a separate Zap that triggers anytime a new document is in that Google Drive folder and uploads the PDF of that document to DropBox. 

I ran into another problem where there were several long questions that took up a lot of space in the survey response that we didn’t want included if they were blank. The HTML I wrote needed to have a placeholder for every question in case they were filled out. I’ll be writing another show&tell post which discusses how I solved this problem.