How to save Airtable data to a PDF document using the gallery view

In this video we’re going to look at creating pdf documents from Airtable data.

This was an issue that was brought to me by one of my startups. They have lots of data within Airtable
and often need to send this to their clients in a pdf document. What was different about this particular
instance was they wanted to send the data in the gallery view because the pictures were really important in terms
of getting the data across.

I’m not going to say that this is hard to do but it’s not necessarily intuitive in terms of the best way to do this.

Here we are in Airtable and you can see we have our Airtable data. For this particular exercise i’m using the real estate template because
it has the main image and then it has the gallery images, then a little bit of information about each one.

If we were to build pdfs from this, generally the place that most people go is the apps side of things. Then you would add an app
here and there are lots in terms of building pdfs and so on and so forth. Some of these are kind of complicated. We’ve got page
designers and the low-tech pdf and so on and so forth.

We could go into the details but actually i found one of the simplest solutions was just to use the functionality within
Airtable itself but it’s not necessarily easy to find, and here next to the ‘view’ is this tiny little grey arrow and when
you click on it you kind of get the usual information in terms of editing and renaming, but down here there is this thing called
the ‘print view’ and this is what i ended up using in terms of building the pdf document.

The idea is that you would use this in order to print to a printer, but it actually you could just output it to a pdf instead.
Here we are once the pdf has generated the preview. We can see here that we’ve got four items on the page. We have some borders in here as well.

You can decide the format you want to print, i’m going to print all of the pages’. Normally it’s set as the printer but you just need to click this box and save it as the pdf.
In here there are some more settings, you can change the number of items on each page, you can do so many pages per sheet. Here we can
see we’ve got eight on a page, personally I ended up preferring the the one page per sheet and then ended up putting it in landscape mode.

The margins aren’t always set, so if you’ve got no margin you get this, but you notice on the right hand side and the bottom they’re a bit odd so you do end up fiddling around with the margins. I ended up moving this to custom, and so you could reset the size of the margins here just by dragging the margin over. That will reload a preview so you can play around with this and you can also scale it. So as it builds the preview so you can say I’m going to put this at 80 percent, and you can see that your margins will change as a consequence.

You can also play around with this scaling. I found that 110 kind of worked for me. You can also have the option for these headers and footers. I wasn’t entirely sure what we should use them for because it just puts the date, the
title of your Airtable and this url which I didn’t find particularly useful.

So you just save that and it will save as a pdf document.

So that was a quick way to output your Airtable data into a nicely formatted pdf when using the gallery view.