Start using Airtable

Introduction

It’s quite easy to start using the Plumsail Documents extension for Airtable:

1. Set up a document generation process.

2. Connect the Plumsail extension to your Airtable workspace.

3. Once everything is set up, select the base records you want to generate documents for and use the Plumsail extension to generate documents automatically.

That’s it! We’ll review each of the steps in more detail further in the article.

Set up a document generation process

For demonstration purposes, we are using the Airtable Client orders database available in the Product catalog template.

We also created an Invoice template that matches this Airtable database. It already is complete with tokens, or special placeholders, from the database. For a deeper understanding of how to create and use your own template for Airtable, you can refer to our guide on how to create a document template for Airtable from scratch.

To use the Airtable template start with creating a process from template:

Then search for the Airtable template:

Name the process and proceed to the settings:

In the process settings we also choose PDF as the output for the result file.

Let’s explore how to use the Airtable extension.

How to add a button and choose a process to run

First, connect the Plumsail Documents extension.

1. Open your Airtable database and click Add an extension button.

2. Type Plumsail in the search field and click Add button when the extension is found.

3. Then Sign up for Plumsail Account if you don’t have an account already and click Connect. You’ll need to enter your Plumsail account email and the password to complete the connection.

4. After connecting to the Plumsail account you’ll see a dialog with details to add a document generation button. Let’s check the settings:

• Process to start. Dropdown menu with all available processes from the account. Select the process you want to use to generate the document.

• Button title. The button title is pre-filled with the name of the selected process, but you can change it.

• Multiple records. When you select multiple records, you can either generate a document for each record or generate one aggregated document with all records.

• Result document. This is how you receive the result document. You have two options: download the document and/or attach it to the record. Additionally, select a field to attach the document.

• Field to store attachment. Select a field from the database to store the generated document.

You can add several buttons to the same database and link them to different processes. All Airtable users who have access to the database will see the added buttons.

5. If you click Add button and close the settings, you’ll see that a button is added to the extension window.

How to copy tokens and add them into the template

Let’s go back to our document generation process to add tokens from Airtable to the document template.

We created a process using the Invoice template based on the Airtable Product catalog template. Feel free to add or remove tokens from the template to align with your database fields. For example, we can explore how to use tokens to display images from the database on the generated document. For guidance on creating and utilizing your own document template, please refer to our step-by-step guide.

1. Open your Documents settings.

And open the template for editing.

2. Then go to the Airtable database and click on the gear button to open the extension settings.

3. Open the list of the tokens by clicking on the Show template tokens button.

4. You’ll see all available tokens from the database. Copy the token you want to display in the generated document.

Let’s now take a look at how to change the Airtable Invoice template to display additional information from the database.

Go back to the documents template and add the tokens you want to display.

For example, we want to add pictures to the Product column cell:

1. Go to the extension settings, select the database Client orders and click on the Show template tokens button as described above.

2. Find the image URL token using the path: Order line items -> Image -> Value -> thumbnails -> small -> url.

3. Paste the copied token to the Product column cell.

4. Add the picture formatter to dynamically insert pictures into the DOCX template.

Run process from Airtable extension

Now, we can close the extension settings and generate an invoice.

The resulting document is downloaded and attached to the record.

Run process from Airtable Interface

It’s also possible to trigger the same Documents process from an Airtable interface with the help of Airtable automations.

Please review the article on How to create document from template using Interfaces and Automations in Airtable.

It shows a detailed walkthrough of adding a button to an Airtable interface and integrating the button with your Documents process.