Shared by Christine Anderson at St. Andrew’s Anglican Church, this story explains how Plumsail Documents transformed their weekly service planning and addressed challenges in their processes.
My job at St. Andrew’s Anglican church in Fort Worth, Texas, is twofold. I manage our church calendar and database, and I am the printing manager. This article details my journey with Plumsail Documents and illustrates how my two functions are intertwined and why our transition to Plumsail has made my job easier.
Further in the article:
St. Andrew’s Anglican Church is a vibrant community dedicated to worshiping God in the beauty of holiness and truth. Our mission is to empower every member for ministry, win souls for Christ, and spread God’s kingdom through charitable works. We emphasize traditional worship, biblical teachings, and fostering a loving church family committed to spiritual growth. Located in Fort Worth, we proudly serve as part of the Episcopal Diocese and the Anglican Church in North America.
Each week, I prepare programs for 2-4 services, drawing text, data, and images from various sources, including our prayer book, scripture, and hymnal. The multiple variations in the services from week to week have made this process a unique challenge.
My goal has been to create a process whereby key individuals could input into a database the elements over which they have jurisdiction. These variable elements would then be coupled with the static text using a merge template.
My first attempt at this process was to use a CSV file to hold the variable elements, which occasionally included significant amounts of text. The limitations of using a spreadsheet became apparent when I discovered that there was a limit on the amount of text that could merge from any one cell. Moreover, the inaccessibility of my data source by others added a layer of tediousness and susceptibility to error.
Spreadsheet overview
Although using Airtable to hold all the text, images, and data brought us up a level or two in the production of our program document, due to the variable nature of the programs, the need to edit was inevitable. Unfortunately, the Airtable Page Designer lacked essential editing features, making it cumbersome to modify both templates and final documents.
Airtable overview
After struggling with this inadequate process for several months, the need for something more powerful was apparent.
In my search for an effective document generation tool, I identified four API solutions that could potentially meet our needs. However, three of these options presented significant drawbacks in terms of cost, editing limitations, and overly complex processes for adding data fields—especially those involving lookups.
Plumsail was the only tool that adequately addressed all of these challenges. The monthly cost for the basic level is much more reasonable than the others. Moreover, Plumsail has a very affordable subscription option that generates a very limited number of documents per month.
Plumsail Documents process
I also found it easy to leverage Google Slides for template creation, providing ample editing options. The insertion of data fields is not difficult to learn and mostly straightforward. The output I use is a PowerPoint document, thus I am able to edit the document after it is generated and before converting it to PDF.
Output document
The only improvement we sought in Plumsail Documents was the ability to organize tokens—generated from Airtable fields for creating document templates—alphabetically or, even better, a search feature. Since our database contains dozens of fields, this would greatly simplify the process. After reaching out to Plumsail with our suggestion, I was pleased to see that they took it on board and implemented the search feature in the Plumsail Documents extension for Airtable.
New token search feature
My overall experience with Plumsail has been outstanding. In addition to its user-friendly interface, competitive pricing, and robust functionalities, the customer service has been exceptional. They have not failed to provide solutions to my hurdles either the same day or within 24 hours. I look forward to exploring other products offered by Plumsail to learn if they might be useful in our environment.
Considering the amount of time I have saved and the frustration I have avoided, I would not hesitate to recommend Plumsail to anyone looking for a good solution and reliable support.
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